Polishing and fixing! (plus a little more) (Patreon)

Hello, it's an exciting and ultra-busy time for the project. After the last post, I fully planned on adding in the rest of the enemy concepts I have lined up, but I've been constantly distracted by other features and ideas.

Making the planet surface feel "alive"

In some ways Lethal Company feels like a game split in two halves--inside and outside. The inside map feels highly randomized but always feels similar overall, while the terrain of the outside feels more unique and hand-crafted per-planet, even though it's always the same terrain. That is because randomizing terrain was almost completely off the table.

Then I added rain into one of the planets.

And this opened my eyes to how neglected this side of the game had been. So I got to adding other features which had been in the back of my mind for months. These included a random weather system (which isn't just for atmosphere), random music (which IS just for atmosphere), and a system which allows giant rocks and other types of objects to spawn on the planet surface. It's not randomizing the terrain but placing things randomly on top.

This and the random weather have made the planet surface feel much more alive. Though the main difference between planets is still going to be the creatures that can appear.

The (actual) Trailer!

Making the big trailer is always a really important moment and hypes me up more than anything else. It means I'm finally confident that I have something good to show off. And I've always loved video editing. So I always try to make a better trailer than the last one. (It's also one of my only pieces of marketing.) This one has voice acting.

Getting good footage of gameplay will be uniquely difficult for this project though, since I can't do it all alone. I realized this while making the teaser last year--it became like a complex dance choreography to get the perfect clips. Looking back at that teaser reminds me how far the game has come; I don't think I've seen one of my game trailers become so outdated since It Steals.

Playtesting Playtesting Playtesting Playtesting Playtesting

At this stage, playtesting is becoming more and more necessary since I'm now really looking at the game's difficulty. I recently added an extra inventory slot (from 3 to 4) and drastically lowered the prices of everything in the shop, all to make the game a bit easier. There's still many bugs I'm working through, but they are becoming less and less impactful and just more annoying. There's a lot of things I tend to overlook until I'm on the very brink of opening up the game to people who have never tried it before.

Oh, I almost forgot! I spent a few days writing up the story/lore for Lethal Company which I thought of a long while ago. This comes in the form of log entries you can find and access on the terminal. Story isn't the focus of the game, but in my struggle to come up with some solid lore and a premise, the game has gained at least some identity.

Also I've decided the game should go into "Early Access" on Steam. That label is a bit superficial, but it basically means it will get a much longer update cycle than my usual games. Wooo