SSH #25 — Sky High

Happy Saturday! It's time for your regularly scheduled news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80. Please commence applause and/or gift-giving.

Deposit all worldly possessions in the basket on the left as you exit, thank you.

Last week, our prestigious, professional, and punctual blog was rudely hijacked by gorgeous holiday photography. There will be consequences.

This week, we're back to being sensible, and we've brought with us a new level concept and some Mac support!

Mac Support (Sort of)— Lucien

Whenever I travel, I use a MacBook! I like the battery life, but software compatibility (especially games) is usually really bad.

But — good news for MS80, the game now runs natively fairly well on macOS! Behold:

No promises on an official Mac release (the gap between “running” and “shippable” is pretty big) but I’d be game for an experimental branch!

FTL: Full Team Liftoff— Harry

Since last Friday was a day off, we shifted the usual team Play and Watch session to Monday night! We played FTL: Faster Than Light.

It's one of my favourite games and a shining beacon of an indie. From what I've heard, the masterminds behind it nailed down their gameplay loop and core concepts almost immediately and spent months iterating on it.

FTL: Faster Than Light is an important touchstone for MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80, partly as a sci-fi game set in space, but also because it revolves around careful management of an energy economy with modular weapons.

FTL is a HARD game, and you need to stay on your toes redistributing your ship's power between weapons, shields, engines, and more to even hope to win. The game communicates all this through handy little visuals showing power distribution between systems, and letting you know when something is damaged, manned, or ready to fire!

Also, Laura stayed up to 3am playing it. I once played it for 10 hours straight and didn't beat the final Rebel Flagship boss a single time.

Sky High Friday Wrap-up— Laura, Harry

Hello, regularly-proportioned humanoids of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

Friday! We took last Friday off as a studio holiday. I went to Scotland. It was cold. There were bagpipes.

Lucien is still away herding bison on his family hydroelectric dam in Montana. We all miss him very much. We especially miss all the times he wasn't on a Mac device. It's the little things, really.

We had a playtest this week! Not a big one, and no huge changes from two weeks ago - except, oh wait! We've got a new level concept!

Situated some 25,000 feet (about 11,000 legs if you're someone who uses sensible units) in the sky, our new level soars over the clouds. We are yet to effectively depict an above-cloud atmosphere, but that's by-the-by. What are you? A cloud cop?

Jokes aside, Laura has worked incredibly hard on imagining what a flying platform location that's partly fragmented and drifted/fallen away could look like in Sector 80. We're planning on this being the first map in a two or possibly three map series, focused on investigating the fate of this platform and salvaging what data/toys it might have.

17 pork and chive dumplings for dinner. I counted.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

Top of the docket is to continue hammering away at the floating complex concept. Laura and I are still figuring out a workflow for swapping tasks between Blender and our editor, but it's given us some improved versatility. We're all happy to be working with a strong level concept in such an interesting space.

Besides that, we need to answer a few questions about our approach to loot and rewarding the player, as well as figuring out a new kind of puzzle we'd like to implement.