Progress chugging onward (Patreon)

(This dev log was written on September 3. I decided not to post it until after the closed beta playtest.)

I couldn't believe it's only been 2 weeks and a day since the last post here. First, I spent a while fleshing out the "placeable ship objects" system, adding in a rotating shop of random furniture and the ability to store furniture you've bought.

Then I added in save files. They are more practical and necessary than I thought before adding them in, since a single run can last a long time and you might want to play the game with multiple groups.

The follow-up playtest

Then I had the same friend group who tested the game at the beginning of August test it again. None of the drastic changes I've made have broken or ruined the experience, so that was a relief to me. One note I took was that they didn't know they could move any furniture in the ship for the majority of the test, but when they figured it out, they instantly created a chaotic hell of their own creation. It changed their experience forever. The ship, their safe haven, became another torture dungeon for them to weaponize against each other.

(A player cries for help, muffled. It can hardly be heard under the constant flushing of the ship's newly-bought toilet and blaring hip-hop played through the other players' microphones.)

The obvious reaction to this would be to limit player freedom, perhaps by giving the host the ability to revoke the ability to move furniture from other players. But I won't resort to that so quickly. How could I limit their self-expression? It's actually beautiful. The state of the ship, whether it's a dark and evil labyrinth or eerily empty and clean--with one look at it, you can understand the dysfunctional social dynamic of any crew. Their twisted collective mind.

Starting to ramp up the creation of content

Then I added in a new item and a new enemy. The item, a fictional chemical called "Tetrazenylpurine", boosts your stamina, with an added side effect if used too much. I then realized an unintended consequence of its design, which is that players are encouraged to pass it around so that everyone gets the effect, which is really funny. But it's also great for the game's items to encourage teamwork this way. This item's concept is arguably sillier than the jetpack.

The new enemy is the most adorable little guy, since a couple of my testers were asking for more neutral creatures. And despite his AI being fairly complex, it was fully coded in the shortest amount of time so far: a day and a half. This shows that Lethal Company's enemy AI engine is starting to need less and less tuning for it to do everything I need, while making things feel almost automatic.

During this time I also got plenty of other great ideas I'm excited to implement. One of them is an entire catapult (and maybe a parachute to help with that.) Lethal Company is giving me a Death Stranding sort of vibe here, as these transportation options feel very liberating and rewarding to unlock and make the simple act of moving across the world fun and exciting.

Picking up bodies

Yesterday I finally looked into how I might make the ragdoll bodies grabbable to players. It turned out to be more possible than I thought. It faintly reminds me of that time in The Upturned when I created the Jack enemies, and they suddenly merged the game's physics system with its enemies and combat, bringing everything together. Here in Lethal Company it wasn't quite as graceful behind the scenes, but you can now pick up player's bodies, and their legs dangle around, and it's actually quite stable! I'm very proud of the ragdoll bodies in Lethal Company, since syncing anything that is locally physics-based in an online game is tricky and partly impossible.

Now you can bring bodies back to the ship to avoid the money penalty you'd accrue for getting players killed--an idea we had since near the beginning of development. This gives me another reason to increase the penalty, since I think it may be a way to organically counter-balance the inherent advantage you get from having the max number of players in your crew. Having more players makes you more efficient, but it also increases liability. That's a more natural way to make the game easier for 2-player lobbies (though single-player will always be a bit rough). And I also love the idea of going on missions to retrieve your friend's body.

Some last thoughts

Lethal Company's development continues to move forward as if on a downhill slope, and it's surprising. This is the longest I've been able to work on any project, and I have lots of ideas why, but I'm not sure.

Mainly, I think it's because it's much easier to add fancy, new features and mechanics into a game than it is to add raw content. This is why making a huge text-based game was impossibly difficult after just a short while; it was mechanically the most simple game in the world, but without any limits, it required an enormous well of creative inspiration to make it work.

Lethal Company is the opposite. It's non-linear and full of mechanical and technical complexity, and the dreaded "content" almost falls under the umbrella of new features and mechanics too, since each enemy requires its own unique gimmicks.

Still, I have been thinking about Welcome To The Dark Place recently; since I put it on hiatus so long ago, I have been building up the well of inspiration (as well as writing down plenty of colorful dreams and nightmares), and I feel like I could push that project to the finish line if I returned to it now. That game and its concept has not lost its novelty in the four or so years since I left it alone. But it will have to wait.