SSH #18 — Wake Up and Smell Trash

Happy Saturday! Time for your weekly news on MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last time, we celebrated our triumph of porting to Jolt Physics.

This week, we've got some exciting new art, AI, and enemies in the pipeline!

The Junkyard— Laura

We've been thinking about the very start of the game lately! Here are some rough paintings of what we're calling the junkyard tutorial.

The focus was to explore the mood of the level and to brainstorm ways to work the tutorial elements into the environment.

It's exciting to be getting back into setting after a few weeks of in-the-weeds technology work and very abstract level design work.

New Enemy AI— Lucien

I've been revamping our enemy AI over the last week! Previously, we built all of our enemies to work entirely using the game's electrical simulation.

Enemies worked like this:

• A camera starts seeing a player and flips a switch
• ...which powers a gimbal, which points at the player and starts letting power through
• ...which starts charging a capacitor
• ...which eventually meets the voltage threshold of a relay, allowing power through
• ...which fires a laser, draining the capacitor until it's below the threshold
• and repeat!

This has a major flaw: how do you make interesting enemies with this system? While it was very neat that we could have enemy AI emerge from how they're constructed, it didn't result in something that was all that fun.

And so this week, I started builting a new foundation for enemy AI that's way more game-like. Enemies still use the equipment attached to them and take advantage of the game's simulation, but now they can choose how often they shoot, when they move or retreat, and whether they retaliate against other enemies that damage them.

Enough talk. Look at this pretty moving picture!

There's still a lot more to do, but the new AI has already proven to be much more fun to play against!

Hexapod Prototype— Rasmus

I've been working on a hexapod enemy. It's just a figment of an animation in Blender so far.

Looking Ahead

We've been working on polishing up a lot of our existing game assets to get rid of some of the grids. We're also starting to nail down more and more of the setting, which I'm super excited to share!

Next week is a playtest week, and our focus will be on AI and all of the shiny new art.

See you all on the far side!