So many new things! (Patreon)

Hello, and boy do I have some neat things to show you today. 

The past two weeks have been spent creating the "anomalies" game mechanic, which is a core mechanic in Lethal Company. There has been a lot of deep thinking about the design of Lethal Company's total randomization and gradually increasing difficulty, which is essential. 

As an example of this gross math stuff, I figured out how to place any number of weighted probabilities in a list and randomly choose out of those. (That's literally my google search.) I can also adjust how each of these probabilities dynamically rise and lower as players progress, by simply adjusting a curve in the game's editor. 

All that math is basically for one thing: an extremely powerful enemy which commonly appears in late-game can also appear on the very first level, but at a 1% chance. Fun, right?

But enough of that. Here is a map.

This map radar item may be too powerful, so I might have to limit its usage severely. But it will serve its purpose for now. I also love "bread crumb-style" items like glowsticks or painted arrows, so I might do something like that.

And here is the process of creating one of the most important items in the game: the Patcher gun.

Watch out!

I got some big ideas last-second and decided to embellish the gameplay mechanic this item is used for. I'll show that next week, but for now I'll say this: the final result is very Ghost Busters-reminiscent.

https://youtu.be/UVGEnnPDeXE 

This stage of the project feels equally exciting and threatening, because this is where the game begins to take its shape, which may be different than what I first planned. However I know that in previous projects when I felt like I was diverging from the plan or doing something unnecessary, it turned out to be completely necessary in the end. All the "extra" stuff I did turned out to be the only stuff that was worth anything. How scary, to think I can easily shrug off some small idea which would actually transform Lethal Company if I ran with it. There's an infinite many paths ahead of me, which means infinitely wrong choices--yet I have to keep moving.