SSH #28 — Gift Horse

We're big fans of aphorisms, such as 'better to have six birds in one basket than half a dozen in the bush'

Lucien

2025-08-02Saturday @ Second Half

There's a saying: don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Unrelatedly, I have a present for you. It's this post. Open it! It's got news about our game in it.

I made this poster. I bet you can't tell. I bet you think I contracted a very expensive design and marketing agency to come up with this. Well, I didn't.

Last week, we shared some of our freshly squeezed wormhole and shield juice with you. That stuff's expensive, you know. Drink up!

This week, we made a brand new character rig and spent some time learning IlluGen, a cool new VFX tool.

Spin Your Hips with RIG V2

Our game's player character has gone through a number of iterations.

It used to be a lizard blob man! Then we got artists on the team, and it became a high fidelity person in a space suit, codenamed Eurydice. After gamescom, we made some gameplay changes and turned the character into a chunky maintenance robot.

In real life, humans had a common ancestor with apes. In MS80, humans evolved directly from bipedal lizards. That's 100% real lore. You can ask Harry about it when he's back.

The new character isn't production quality, but it's roughly the right shape and size and has been an awesome platform for experimentation.

You can see Eurydice in all our capsule and key art still. That's on the docket to update sooner than later!

Shout out to Laura and the Second Half alumni, Ed and Melissa, for their awesome work on this character!

With the robot character, we originally kept the same Mixamo rig and animations as the previous characters. It worked pretty well, but the rig didn't fit the new character's proportions and it didn't feel very much like a robot.

We also kept having limbs overlap due to the aiming IK system interacting with human-ish arm movements that led to us dying a lot

That's GOTTA hurt!

That changed this week! I created a new rig and some animations to go with it. The character now pivots at the hips and moves its entire upper body when aiming. It's a little uncanny, but it's definitely more robot.

I'm finally putting the art degree that I lie about having to use!

It's on our roadmap to hire an animator for a few months once we're closer to Early Access. For now, the work I've done will tide us over.

IlluGen Release

JangaFX, the creators of EmberGen and friends, released their new VFX tool, IlluGen. We'd been experimenting with EmberGen for some time but ultimately realized that it's for fire. Who'da thought?

We heard about IlluGen and I was so excited I even put it the team's calendar.

It turns out that IlluGen is really neat! The team behind it has also been very responsive in handling bug reports and feature requests.

Expect some fancy new effects around next week from Laura, who's been having a great time tinkering.

Looking Ahead

We watched Arrival together on Friday. It's a good movie. It joins Interstellar in the ever-growing list of "daughter-based sci-fi" movies we've seen as a team.

I'm not sure what we'll be working on next week. I think it's my job to know that. Personally, my brain has been totally taken over by a Rocket League relapse. If you can beat me in a duel, you can win an early demo of the game. Just join our Discord server and send the message "@lpg It's time to duel!"

Until next week! Cheers.