SSH #23 — Sector 80 Play Place

Hello and welcome to Saturday! If Saturday is already over in your locale, please pretend it is still Saturday.

Today, shockingly, we're going to learn about what's happening with MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we launched our newly renovated Steam page.

This week, we experimented with new controls and played on a playground!

A Positive Atmosphere— Lucien

I did some work this week to improve our atmosphere implementation. It's still rough, but having unified volumetric rendering for the atmosphere and fog is shaping up to be pretty cool.

Lights, Camera, Action Groups!— Lucien

For this playtest cycle, we've been cooking up a new way to configure the player's equipment!

Player builds can get very complex, with several weapons, gimbals, and power sources. Check out my build from Friday's playtest:

To manage all these parts, we created the concept of an "action group", and added a section to the item tooltips to configure which action group and hotkey an object should be bound to.

You can also configure the player robot itself. You can set which arms are active for an action group as well as which camera the game should use when you activate that action group.

This feature has landed somewhere between the action groups in Kerbal Space Program and the channels in Mars First Logistics so far. After playtesting, I think our implementation is a little too clunky, so we'll keep iterating!

The Friday Wrap-up— Harry

Hello, complex multicellular organisms of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

It was a playtest Friday! This week's featured some new atmospheric effects and a totally reworked level.

It's got a playground and everything. There's a climbing frame and pipes. It's like a birthday in there, albeit with laser-spewing, electro-shock crab robots.

It's not really like a birthday at all, actually.

Today's big level rework was really the result of a series of experiments. The goal of all of these was mainly just to try making something a little different.

With a modular kit of floors, walls and ceilings, it's way too tempting to fill every single level with long, twisting hallways of close-quarters/no-cover shooting matches. That's a valuable part of our gameplay loop, but an entire level of that gets old very quickly.

SO, today's level: playground, forest, a 'Monty Hall problem,' and whatever the hell the other kind of forest is.

It's not pretty, but it's certainly interesting, and I've learned a lot today about what works and what doesn't. More changes in the weeks to come!

Laab moo for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

Running playtests every other Friday has continued to be very enlightening and we had an awesome time this week. It's always fulfilling to have validation about the things we're doing well, and a clear path to fix all of the things that aren't good yet.

Next week, the team is going to be playing FTL: Faster Than Light. I'll be out for a couple weeks and spending some time back home, but I'm leaving the team in capable hands!

See y'all next week!