Working on the game loop. (Patreon)

The past two weeks I've been reworking all the systems for the new prototype. Since I removed the elevator which previously transitioned players between levels, I've basically turned the spawn ship (the equivalent of Phasmophobia's van) into the new elevator. So now the ship is a lot cooler.

It turns out that getting player physics to work this way, like in Sea Of Thieves, takes a lot less work than I thought. I then used that new knowledge to rework the item-grabbing system so that it feels responsive for every player. Glad that's over.

Then I made it so you can call the ship to leave and end the current round. (PS: This game's loading screens are all hidden! It's seamless.) You can leave the planet alone, ditching your crew, and they'll all be reported missing in the endgame stats screen. What fun!

For this project I've decided I'm trying to balance these three aspects. If I neglect any for too long, they start to have a bit of a stalemate amongst each other, because they're all required.

The past couple months were spent working on random content to prototype with, but these past two weeks I've been drilling hard into the game loop, since it was starting to suffer. I'm about to be finished with it for now, leaving it off on the rewards system, levelling and purchasing gear. Cosmetics will probably be the very last thing I work on.

Next, I'm going to have to model a ton of random stuff--although I've realized something cool: Since I always make my own models and assets, I've been building a library to use from my previous projects. So it's not quite as difficult to fill a room with random furniture as it once was!

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One last weird detail is that I'm noticing Lethal Company is... a lot like Pikmin? 

Both games have you scavenging an area for scrap, carrying it back to your ship while avoiding enemies, with nightfall being your impending doom. Here's why I noticed this. A design problem led me to an idea: certain doors should take a long time to open and can be passively worked on by an automatic lock-picker tool. This encourages you to multitask and--more importantly--forces you to delve deep into the maze when time is getting thin. That's just like leaving a group of pikmin hammering at a dirt wall to return to later!

I don't think I was inspired by Pikmin but by a similar core idea which also happened to be behind that game. And that idea led me down a similar (but more scifi-ish and horrific) trail.