Move it! (the objects in the ship) (Patreon)

What an eventful two weeks it has been since the last post! I may even call it another explosion for the project, though it's not quite as earth-shattering this time. It is still the same game, by and large, even if there have been some big adjustments. Over the past couple days, I've overhauled the system for unlocking decorations and upgrades that stay inside the ship, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it's one of the most important changes I've made through the entire development of the project. There were some big things before that, though, and we can't skip them.

Simplifying the time system (WARNING: A confusing mess!)

The first real playtest I saw at the beginning of the month illuminated some big problems with the game. The first was the result of two competing desires I had: that players would be able to land the ship on planets at any time of day (making the world feel "persistent" and real in some way) and that players would be pushed to take risks, staying up late to get as much scrap as possible. But if players could land and leave at any time of day, they would just leave at around noon everyday, no matter how much progress they had made, and fly to another planet where it was 6:00 AM, easily chasing the safe, daylight hours. This group hardly saw it turn night time, and there was really no good reason for them to. Lethal Company's objective of collecting objects sort of necessitates a "diminishing return" as less and less items are left behind with each trip to/from home base. So staying up late was just wasting precious time when they could fly somewhere else. In the end, it felt like they spent more time switching between planets than actually playing the game.

There were many ways to fix this issue. I think if I list some of them off, you will see how technical and confusing this issue was. Some ideas considered were...

1. Adding special doors in the factory that open at a certain time of day, forcing players to wait. I like the spirit of this idea, but it doesn't get to the heart of the problem; players would still be better off flying to a planet where it's safer.

2. Making it cost extra time to route the ship to any planet, to discourage constantly switching between them (but this is flawed reasoning as players are always forced to route to another planet when night falls, so the time is always going to be lost anyway.)

3. Simply speed up time or make the game harder to compensate--but this makes the game too hard for players that play the game in the way that I want it to be played.

Most of these solutions would add contrivances onto Lethal Company when it's already kind of contrived to begin with. Plus, I'm not sure if players would strategize so deeply that they would notice if their strategy wasn't technically optimal. If the fix wasn't going to change the behavior of the average player, it wasn't good enough.

So the fix I decided on was to sacrifice and simplify. I removed the "hours" from the time system. So you always land on planets at dawn, and leaving the planet uses up the whole day, no matter how early you leave. This is similar to the #2 fix in the list, except it's more understandable with a "videogamey" kind of logic, and it also makes more sense. Leaving early in the day, which is taking less risk, would cost you more time than if you left in the evening. Also, this means that you can route to any planet whenever you want, since no planet will be experiencing midnight while another is at dawn. Landing on planets later in the day was just never something you would want to do, so it actually limited your choices.

This is all probably totally confusing to someone who hasn't played the game, and it probably won't make much sense to someone who never played the version that had these issues. But I like journaling these important decisions anyway.

Beefing up the weather system

The simplification of the time system made the game feel a lot less dynamic, and looking at the list of planets was just like looking at a level-select. I hate that. The old system limited your choices, but it at least forced you to make different ones each time! I also wanted to keep players from landing on the same planet over and over. It's just too repetitive.

So I sought to replace the sense of a connected, dynamic world by upgrading the weather system. Now instead of each planet displaying its time, each planet displays its current weather before you land. I also added in some new, more intense weather to flesh this out. Some weather on these planets can be disastrous, and I mean it.

The fulfillment of the "customizable ship" idea

Since the very early beginnings, I have danced around this idea of giving players a persistent, customizable space, similar to the elevator in The Upturned, that sort of represents your progression through the game. I am always fighting the feeling of my game being a set of disconnected levels (like all the flash games I played as a kid.) And in The Upturned, being able to take objects with me between floors gave me the feeling that the hotel was an actual place, reminding me of how far I had come.

Since Fall of last year, there is no elevator in Lethal Company. But the autopilot ship has slowly become a much better version of it. A couple months ago I added a system that allows you buy stationary decorations that sit inside the ship, like lights, carpets, and a television. And this system didn't get much use, nor did I feel like adding any more content to it. It actually gave me the feeling of an old, linear Roblox tycoon game--the really old kind--in which every player's factory looked exactly the same when they were finished and had pressed every single button.

So I started the task of making players able to move things around in the ship wherever they want, AND making it so these items come in and out of stock at random. Now this system is totally non-linear and personalizes the game for everyone who plays it. This was an undertaking that I was afraid to approach. I almost decided it would be too much work and decided against it. Among other things, it even forced me to overhaul the game's save and load system (which was needed anyway). But I can already tell that it's worth it. It feels like it opened up a whole new objective path for the game, like a mini home renovation game that serves to differentiate each playthrough. It feels like a fundamental piece of Lethal Company was missing and has just been realized.