2024 is a year (Patreon)

Hello, I'm sorry I haven't released an update to Lethal Company in so long. Crazy changes have taken place in my life, and I've been mentally and emotionally checked out; sometimes I have felt like I am waiting to "wake up". Throughout my life I have found that making any games or art is extremely difficult when there is any other business to tend to, be it school or finances or relationships. I genuinely don't know how I would live a busy life; business seems to suck the life out of me, and I seem to thrive under long periods of silence. 

When I'm stressed out or distracted, working on my game feels like driving blind; I think the stuff I am making for the game is okay, but just prepare yourself because it's going to be some weird, off-beat stuff. I hoped to release Version 50 a little while ago, but now I think Version 50 will be less of a culmination and more of a new beginning. Version 45 was the fastest and hardest I have worked in a long time, and it might take some time to get back to that level.

I still don't think it'd be fun to spoil the content I have made for Version 50, and I've never really done that before here. So I'll just talk about it. The enemy I am currently texturing has maybe the best concept art I've ever made and is almost too zany, like he belongs in The Upturned instead. I hope that by texturing him he will become more gritty and fit better in this game. He might end up looking like something from Little Nightmares or Over The Garden Wall, and his concept brings out a laugh from basically anyone because it's so absurd. The biggest addition other than content is that now moving down slopes will make you faster and moving up slopes will make you slower, but I'm not sure how much of a difference this will make to speed-running and min-maxing, since I had to make it subtle or it felt quite unnatural.

A lot of people have asked for underwater areas or underwater moons and factories, and it's really interesting to me how much this seems to be wanted. Something I forgot is that Lethal Company was originally inspired by scuba diving and cave diving; it is part of the reason you have oxygen tanks that look like scuba gear. I purposefully made the factory layouts feel like swirling, crazy cave networks, and something I also realized is that when steam valves break it is similar to kicking up sediment from the bottom of an underwater cave that has no flow. Cave diving is like a complex and fragile operation, with lots of reliance on proper equipment and composure necessary to prevent dominos from falling and causing disaster, where nature is unforgiving and seems to find its way into any crack in your system; that's the kind of "horror" I wanted Lethal Company to have. So it's really cool that people at least subconsciously see this inspiration.

I really hope next time I will have a huge amount to show you. I do have this new ambient track. I wrote it as I was exploring the themes of Lethal Company's story, and when I started writing it, I had decided the theme was "separation from God". I tried to strike a feeling of prolonged exile, distance, and endurance. Personally I still think ambient track #3 is the best with #2 as a close second. Track #4 doesn't exist