February! Bug fixing, misc. content, and story (Patreon)

The pace has continued through the past two weeks.

First of all, I tested the game some more and fixed a load of bugs. As always the mystery is not how it's so broken. It's how it has been functioning at all?? Bug fixing can be overwhelming, making it feel like the game is falling apart--especially on apocalyptic days where all the rare bugs happen to show themselves at once by random chance. But I'm pushing through it, and the game becomes more and more stable.

Walkie Talkies!

Second of all, I added in the walkie talkie item. I wasn't able to make it transmit voice chat in 3D space like a real walkie talkie, so sadly you can only hear players talking through it when you're holding it. However it CAN transmit all other sounds around it while someone's holding the button, including footsteps, doors, ambient creaks, and monsters. This video shows my friend holding his walkie talkie up to a boombox while I'm far away. (It sounds choppy in the clip, but that's another bug I fixed.) I was surprised how much hearing someone walk while they talk through the walkie talkie helps sell the effect of a walkie talkie. 

Perhaps fun features like this will entice more players to use the in-game voice. I'm glad games like Phasmophobia have done some work to prove to players how limiting communication can be more fun than just a hindrance.

How the "Company Building" came to be

I talked in my last post about how I feel like I completed the game's loop of scavenging scrap to sell to purchase routing to riskier planets to get more loot to sell. 

There was one thing I've wondered about from time to time for the past four or five months. That is, how does the scrap and loot get sold? Well it would just disappear and become money when you got out with it. This didn't feel great. But I felt like creating an entirely new place just for you to go and sell your items (like the starting islands in Sea Of Thieves) was not worth the effort, if it was just to make it feel more tangible.

Then I played Dark and Darker, which has a similar, REALLY GOOD game loop that is almost the same concept. In Dark and Darker, you don't sell your loot at a physical location but in a menu screen--yet it still feels better. Because dragging your items into the box to sell them makes chinks and jangles like treasure should, and the game doesn't just do it for you.

So I sucked it up and made a new planet in my game where you can land your ship and sell your items. Naturally I chose to call it "the Company building," since that's who you work for. But since I actually had to depict the Company now, I had to figure out what the Company IS, and that led me down a rabbit hole. I can't spoil what I came up with, but I do have a juicy premise for the story of Lethal Company. It makes the name even more pointed. (Who knew doing this would be so worth it?)

Backstory?

Now I'm trying to figure out how I can explore this premise with lore that players can find somehow, since this is a multiplayer game that isn't very linear. But writing lore and backstory is not my strength, because it requires me coming up with so many dry specifics and exact events and timelines in order to make you feel like you're uncovering real history. Whereas I'm impatient and want to get to the point, so I write stories that are almost fairy tales on the surface. This game's structure and atmosphere beg for something else though.

Very rarely I have been drawn into a game's lore; they can sate your curiosity like taking apart the juicy details of a real-life mystery can. But I don't know where to start.

Oh yeah, and there is this.