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Happy Saturday!
Bear with us while we recalibrate the Second Half Games magical chronometer. Don't worry, it's definitely Saturday! But which Saturday and in what year might be up for debate.
Last week, Lucien announced an end to the war of attritional gameplay — and also revealed new enemies!
Funny way to end a war, huh?
This week, we're taking a look at how far we've come.
Throwback Saturday— Lucien
Check out this trailer from WAY BACK WHEN:
Lucien cut this trailer together in December, 2023 when the team was just him, with Eryn helping part time. He wanted to release the game by the end of 2024!
"Looking back at how little was actually in the game back then makes me want to cut together a new trailer for us," Lucien said, "Not having a trailer on Steam is no good!"
The Ghost of Gamescom Past— Lucien, Harry
It's now been over a year since we exhibited our demo at Gamescom 2024! In keeping with the theme of looking back at what we've done, Lucien engaged in some reminiscing in our community Discord server.
Lucien said, 'The cauldron was such a fun environment to work on and I'm always shocked how we put that together in like zero time.' It was our first time working together as a team and we were working with a really tight deadline!
I think my favourite experience of Gamescom 2024 was seeing how people picked up our engineering system (or didn't). As tutorialisation, Laura drew up this very handy visual aid that was surprisingly easy to miss!
Gamers get very tunnel-visioned when they get new toys. Who knew?
The Friday Wrap-up— Harry
We are pleased to announce: THE ANTI-ATTRITION CAMPAIGN AND ELECTRICAL REFORM IS A SUCCESS! Please commence applause. Three weeks of backbreaking work (mostly Lucien's) has paid off and we're going to keep moving forward!
This playtest, we also experimented with reintroducing the cable constraints some readers might remember from our old Gamescom 2024 demo. These were only partly implemented at the time because we felt they were confusing and would overly complicate our engineering and our physics. Some smart cookies were specially chosen to test them out anyway.
Well, they're back! And they're still kinda broken and they clip through everything...and also you can lasso things (including enemies) to yourself and drag them around. Laura went through playtest today collecting harmless enemy bodies and walking them around like pets. They dangle off ledges too.
We'll keep at it. The wires offer an interesting alternative to the magnetic contact-based engineering we've been focusing on, letting you really get off the grid and customise your build. We think it's worth a shot. The builds have become even more chaotic though, so there's some cleaning up to do.
Looking Ahead
Interviews for our 3D Environment Artist role begin next week! That'll keep Lucien and Laura busy all week, while I'm going to continue iterating on our floating warehouse level. We've been collecting a lot of internal feedback during our playtests and have some clear directions to move in!
We also watched half of The Martian as a team a few weeks ago. We still need to finish that. This is actually the second sci-fi film starring Matt Damon that we've watched.
The important lesson is that you should never get on a spaceship with Matt Damon.