SSH #34 — Active Activatables Actively Activate

Happy Saturday!

Last week, Harry took us down memory lane and showed just how far we've come in the last year and a half.

This week, we've been thinking about environments, both in that we're hiring an environment artist, and that we're thinking about environment interactivity!

Interactivity via Activity— Lucien, Harry

Our last playtest cycle was focused on reforming our combat and electrical systems to make them less attritional. For this cycle, my goal was to make it so more folks on the team can make levels with unique and reactive mechanics.

Specifically, we have a new set of components that can be added to entities to trigger behaviors on themselves or on other entities.

Doesn't that sound exciting and not-at-all technical? Please welcome: Activations!

Entities can be wired to other entities, enabling our team to build very complex interactions within a level without touching a line of code. It feels fitting to have a system like this in our editor that's as diegetic and tactile as the game!

Harry has already used Activations to create some shockingly evil traps for the player. I'm afraid I may be helping create a monster... or maybe I'm just giving one better tools, it's hard to say.

An Nvidia driver update broke a bunch of stuff on my machine, please pardon the debug lighting in some of these screenshots.

Like all of our editor features, this is a feature that players will have access to in the game from day one for building their own contraptions, traps, and entire levels!

Hiring Update— Laura, Lucien

We had our first week of interviews for our 3D Environment Artist role.

While I'm happy that Second Half is a relative safe haven from the chaos, I know that the games industry as a whole is in rough shape. This week was one where I wish we had an unlimited hiring budget and could bring all the fantastic folks we've talked with along for the ride.

To everyone who's taken the time to apply and talk to us about the team: thank you!

Laura and I have interviews through next week. After that, we're hoping to send an offer immediately and onboard our new team member as soon as possible!

Quests: Coming (Back) Soon— Lucien

MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 used to have quests. Here was my favorite quest from the gamescom demo. It was also the first quest we ever made:

Currently, the game doesn't have any quests! We spend every playtest pretending to have meaning in our lives, but without any clearly-defined objects laid out in text on our screen, we're hopelessly lost.

Next week, however, we'll have quests! They'll be driven by Activations! It's going to be a fantastic time, and we'll tell you all about it next week.

Looking Ahead

We finished watching The Martian on Friday. It felt like a pretty great capstone to the week. It also reinforced a lesson we now take to heart: stay away from Matt Damon.

Next week is a playtest week, and I'm looking forward to how much more the game is going to feel like a game. It's a great feeling to see something creative become more and more fully-realized every single week!

See you next week!