The beta test + bug fixing! (Patreon)

Hello, the past two weeks have been a busy time. I am still recovering from the days before the beta test and during it, since I was hardly able to sleep.

Closed beta test results

The closed beta that included about 100 people showed that the game was even more broken than I thought it was. Everything in the game (except for one system) had some kind of game-breaking bug or softlock. I made a Trello page for this, since notepad didn't cut it anymore, and there are currently 103 bugs in all. 73 of them are almost certainly fixed.

The exception is that there were hardly any bugs that had to do with enemy AI, which could mean that the game's enemy AI system is really solid. It could also mean that when enemies bug out, it just appears as them being unpredictable. The only real bug with enemies I noted was that sometimes they get stuck on open doorways. (I still haven't figured this one out.)

Despite the game being so broken (that it made actual progression without softlocking kind of impossible), I'm very pleased that everyone seemed to have a great time. I announced that the game will be available during Steam Next Fest: October. The reason I want to open up a demo is because I know it can be hard to get four friends on board to spend ten dollars on the game. But that's the experience the game is meant for!

For new features added after the beta test, there is not a lot yet. But for one thing, I made the Tetrazenylpurine item pitch-shift your voice like helium. Another thing was making the game save and load the items you leave in your ship...

Saving and loading items

Previously, upon reloading a file, the game simply gave you money back for the items you used to have in your ship; except, this could only apply to items you bought, not scrap you found. (Because I didn't want players to exit and reload their file to sell scrap quickly and safely, bypassing the need to go to the company building.) So when you closed the game, your scrap had to just disappear if you didn't sell it. That's pretty bad. If you ever wondered why Phasmophobia starts in a lobby (which is always the same), then takes you to the van before starting the round, instead of just starting you out in the van from the outset... this is probably part of the reason why. Lethal Company starts in the "van", and so it has to manually sync all sorts of changeable states with the players who join the server. But now you can load up a file, and all your items will be exactly where you left them. The only limitation is that you won't be able to pick up certain items that have complex interactions until you actually pull the lever to start the ship. Woo, netcode!

This drill is the next (and last) important system I am planning to add to the game, which sort of ties it all together. I'm not going to explain it. It may or may not be in the game by the time the demo comes out.

Times are changing

While fixing everything I had to update to the new version of Unity, which was unfortunate, since literally 5 minutes later, I found out about Unity's self-destruction (apparently taxing developers about half a cent for each individual install of a game, including reinstalls. From what I heard, they were planning to determine the number of installs through their own "proprietary data models". It's a scary thing for a company to hide how much they think you owe them.)

They've walked it back, but I was already planning to move to a different game engine since a year ago due to incidents exactly like this. From this particular event, I've learned just how dishonest Unity seems to be as a business. After this point, if you keep investing time into the engine, you may be asking for trouble (or to have all that time wasted.)

For this and other reasons, I feel like this is the end of an era. Lethal Company is an ultimate kind of game, taking ideas and things I've learned from everywhere. I am not quite sure what I will do next. For a long, long time I have had a vision of a game that is somewhat similar to Outer Wilds, where you explore a dark, apocalyptic, alien-infested open world with an old car (think of the game Jalopy but in Cloverfield). I also want to make a very grounded, realistic cave diving or cave exploration game, probably multiplayer; the movement system would be very detailed, with realistic sort of dangers like drowning or falling or getting stuck and suffocating. I think these ideas will have to wait, because they are really bare-bones as game ideas, and they are probably better suited for Unreal Engine.

After Lethal Company and WttDP I will be releasing smaller games while learning Unreal. I think I will be playing more games as well. I have felt like all my work has been fueled by the games I played and saw in 2017. (Little Nightmares, Rain World, Darkwood, Night In The Woods, Stories Untold, What Remains Of Edith Finch, Duskers, and more.) I would like a refresh, though I kind of feel like late 2016 and 2017 was an unusually golden era for indies. If 2024 is a really refreshing year for me, I'll post here about each game I play and what I thought about it.