SSH #27 — Yeet Into Wormhole

What's the best day of the week?

SATURDAY!

What happens today?

News about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, Harry unveiled the secret inner workings of Second Half Games and unfortunately publicly implicated us in our plot to rule the world.

This week, we juiced the heck out of anything we could get our hands on. Specifically: wormholes and energy shields.

Persistent Worlds

In MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80, you travel via wormhole between planets in a stolen spaceship that has limited range. Before this week, we had no animation for traveling between planets.

That made travel feel kind of bland, but it is bland NO LONGER!

The sudden addition of a wild spectacle happening outside the ship has made us think more about how the ship should be laid out to make visiting exotic alien planets interesting. You'd think they'd sell themselves, but travel agents have to make a living somehow.

I also created a new savefile format to support storing all of the places you can visit. That's not a tangible thing that you can see, so instead, take a look at the new "load game" screen!

Being able to leave and come back to the same place and see it exactly as you left it is surprisingly pleasant.

It's one of those things that makes the game feel way more like a real video game instead of just an art project that five people are creating in a shed in my backyard.

Shields Come to Life— Eryn & Laura

Last week, Laura created some concepts for our frontal energy shield part, which temporarily provides immunity from energy weapons in one direction.

This week, Eryn made those shields real, replete with deployment and retraction animations!

It's been a great success, and the new visuals have made us use the shield way more than before. We apes love when things look good.

We'll have a full body, always-on shield coming sooner than later, something that I'm very excited about!

The Friday Wrap-up With Harry— Harry

Hello, complex multicellular orga- oh crap, I used that one about 4 weeks ago.

Hello, adjective nouns of the- no, I used that one back in March.

You know, I should have been more careful before I committed to this bit back in January. I've been writing these more or less every week since January! That's more than half a year ago! It'll be Christmas soon.

I'm very tired.

Hello, friends of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

It is Friday again. It's been a quiet week for me at Second Half, but a busy one for the rest of the team. If you've been keeping up with our dev updates, you'll know we've pushed through some new updates for shields and level persistence.

We're all about persistence here at Second Half.

Lucien's also made some new changes to our ship and to the ship's lightspeed animations. I'm aiming to get on some new sound effects for that next week, but hopefully you'll get to have a look at that pretty soon.

We had a playtest today! No new levels, but a lot of playing around and ironing out some creases.

Eryn made this thing. It's horrific, and it's brilliant. I'm going to call it 'the laserbeast', like a wildebeest, but laser, except it isn't like a wildebeest at all. It's much more like a giraffe, so I've almost got the geography right.

She has her own nickname for it, but I don't think I can repeat that here in polite company. There could be children reading. I hope there aren't.

It's six hubs connected to a gimbal connected to a laser blaster, giving you the ability to peak round corners and pierce enemy shields by charging through them.

I think I'm going to have to redesign some of the combat encounters. Eryn continues to be an unaccounted factor in the world of death robots, which we love her for.

Dongbei zhajiangmian for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

It's usually a fun week when it's a playtest week. My backlog is filled with little bugs to fix across the whole game as we march slowly towards our next public alpha test. After gamescom last year, I promised to have a new demo out by gamescom 2025, and I'd love to keep that promise!

Next week, I'm creating a new rig and animations for the player character to maximize their robotic nature and eliminate Mixamo once and for all.

Harry is close to having a draft of the game's story, Laura is working on concepts for in-game dialogue, Rasmus will be creating evil traps to fill levels with, and Eryn has an assignment so secret that she's not even been informed of it yet.

We'll see you next week!