The Gigantic Version 60 Post (Patreon)

Hello again, Version 60 is out now so it's time to talk about it. As usual I'll try to go through in the order that it was all developed. Here we go!

New Scrap

The new scrap was mostly all modeled already, right around the time that Version 55 came out of beta. It's getting a little more difficult to think of good ideas for scrap, since I have some specifications for what I consider good scrap objects. It was hard for me to articulate this, but I think the best way of describing it is that I want the objects to be recognizable and somewhat mundane, and not all of them should be too flashy or gimmicky. And ideally they should have some implicit roleplaying function or joke. The toilet paper fits these criteria quite well since it's mundane and recognizable and plays into that meme of hoarding toilet paper during the apocalypse. I've also noticed the garbage lid could look like a landmine.

The gimmick problem is still a concern though, as I feel like these fun items become less special when they are the only thing you can find; I would kind of like to add more basic machinery scrap like the engine and axle, although those are much harder to model because I have no idea how they work and where to find good reference for them. But I believe if there were more actual, boring scrap, collecting scrap would paradoxically become more exciting.

This fits into one of the broader problems I'm always worrying about in Lethal Company, which is pacing out the special moments so that you're not desensitized. That is why at least the stats of Experimentation never change (ironically). The other moons have sort of been compromised as I added new content in and we all forgot what it felt like to be overwhelmed by like 1 creature. But Experimentation remains a hold-out for new players who need that early pacing. Right now in balancing I am leaning heavily towards decreasing the chaos, since it's at a maximum on most planets.

The Mineshaft

Very early on, some point after the mansion interior had been made and around the time the game was released, I began to want a new, cramped interior with a very small/granular tile size. This idea started out in my head as something similar to the facility, and I planned for there to be a deactivated elevator or turnstiles as well as perhaps vents you have to crawl through.

Fast-forward to just after V55 was completed and I was itching to finally dive into interior updates. I don't know when, but at some point the idea had shifted to caves. I was very critical of making a new interior if its geometry would feel redundant in any way; the mansion's geometry differed from the facility by being grand instead of claustrophobic. Another claustrophobic interior wasn't really enough to make me excited since I've exhausted a lot of the potential of square rooms and tunnels. But caves are another paradigm to work in.

So I decided on a mineshaft as the theme, which meant there would be a contrast between reinforced tunnels and rugged cave networks. I specifically wanted a more modern, industrial mineshaft, not wacky Wario's gold mine. So that's the kind of reference I looked for.

I decided that the mansion's main room is too big and hurts the level generation a little, so the main entrance door would just spawn in the middle of this small tunnel network at the start; basically, there would be no main room, just a unique tile-set for one part of the interior. This area would get a lot bigger in the future, since the caves are too evil to encompass 90% of the maze.

At the same time I was considering a few ideas: 1. A tram that moves through the tunnel network, or 2. A minecart system. I was certainly going to add some kind of transportation, using the new system I added for the Company Cruiser. However there was some problems with the idea of minecarts and trams--all around, I just wasn't sure how they were going to work in the grand scheme without ruining everything and halting development because of their crazy gimmickiness. So the idea of an elevator quickly took over. Honestly, if I had not been motivated to make the Cruiser, I don't think I would have wanted to go through the work of making the elevator function. So thank the CC.

Creating the caves was surprisingly smooth, and it should be easy to make more of them. Luckily I had shifted away from Probuilder (in Unity) to Blender when working on the mansion interior to simplify the workflow; modelling the caves would have been impossible otherwise. The tricky thing to figure out was how to make the caves connect together seamlessly. I had to create two irregular, yet symmetrical, non-square shapes to connect all of the caves together, and it turned out to not be noticeable at all when you're exploring them.

The last step was to use a triplanar shader for the cave rocks, so the rock texture has no seams and I never had to worry about UV mapping. I learned about triplanar shaders way back when I was making It Steals and wanted the checkerboard walls to be seamless. This was another moment where I was glad I use HDRP in Unity now, because it surprisingly had all the shader features I needed. The rock texture worked beautifully, so it's used everywhere. When I make more cave tiles, I may want to figure out some other colors and materials for the caves (which may be a challenge if I want them to fade seamlessly), but shockingly the lack of variety in that aspect wasn't an issue.

I made all the cave tiles in relation to each other, not worrying too much about their exact size in relation to the player, until I loaded them into the engine and set the scale of all of them. The most cramped and small cave tile (a four-way intersection) turned out even more tiny than I had expected it to be, because the other tiles would be too large if I scaled it up. But it turned out to be just about perfect. Really, I was just shocked because I was used to the giant mansion and facility hallways.

With these caves I want to replicate an actual cave system which is quite inhospitable and really wasn't made to scale with human beings. So the ceiling will hang down and the jagged or lurching ground will inconvenience you. Unlike the facility and mansion which at least APPEAR to be designed for you (but are really cave systems of their own), the caves have no pretense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MOKTU9tCbw

The water tile was the final cave tile I made for V60, and it takes this immersion as far as I'm willing to go, because it's intentionally designed to get you stuck on its polygons. It's a devious, chaotic tile and I wasn't sure it would work; I had a feeling it would become infamous. But after making it a LITTLE easier to crawl through, it actually seems like one of the most fun parts of the mineshaft to me now. Although it causes death, it doesn't seem like the run-ender I expected it to be.

Ideally, it acts as the equivalent of the cursed broken railing jump tile in the facility, which I had also not believed in because I thought it was too gimmicky. But these kinds of tiles add a dynamic to interactions with enemies which forces players to slow down or rethink because they can't simply run to the exit. (I think the mansion lacks one of these in particular, and I've been pondering that for a long time.)

It went through a lot of planning, since it had to fit within a 2x1 (impossible) or 2x2-sized tile while being quite a complex design, limited by how fast players can actually crouch through it.

After that the mineshaft was basically finished (though it would require a week of playtesting.) I was ready to release the update with no enemies, but I just HAD to create a new enemy to find players in the caves. This new interior had to be introduced to players along with the fear of a new, unknown threat.

So I set out to make an enemy which was as dreadful and terrible as possible.

This might be a good time to take a break, because this post is massive. Wow

The Maneater

The sole purpose of the Maneater was to induce fear and panic. So I modelled it with no intention of it being appealing; maybe it was inspired by the wendigos in Until Dawn.

The enemies in Lethal Company all sit on a scale of how scary the game is trying to be; I believe Flowerman sits on one end of the scale, while manticoils or tulip snakes sit on the other end. And maybe Butlers would be in the very center because they're just so absurd. I've been trying hard to put another enemy on Flowerman's end of the scale, not just by the death animation or visual design but by its behavior and mechanics. So the Maneater is maybe the first time I've attempted that with sole focus. I really want to make a rare creature that players react to with complete aversion and dread--something they shudder at the thought of. (Of course the upcoming plot twist would turn that up on its head, but that's how the Maneater began.)

I put a lot of consideration into how I might be able to use the idea of deafening players to all sounds, including each other, to increase panic and confusion. It looks like this idea once again has fallen to the wayside (the last attempt being with the Rad Mechs) in favor of making it like a passive sneaking enemy which waits around corners. Perhaps the idea of deafening players will never work? (But I'm not so deterred yet.)

Anyway, after days of just tweaking and fine-tuning, it actually does this properly half the time, while the other half of the time it just freaks out. That wasn't good enough for me if the enemy was going to be this simple, but then the, the uh the, the baby

When talking with my friends, someone jokingly mentioned the idea of feeding the Maneater scrap to keep it tame, like feeding Shrimp. I had considered the idea before, but I determined it wouldn't work because the enemy would have to be over-powered for players to want to sacrifice the main objective. I don't know how I thought of it having a baby form, but when that idea popped up, I was practically required by international law to see it through.

While coding the baby AI, I had to try very hard to reign it back under control, cutting out mood meters and emotional states if they did not have an identifiable effect on its behavior and overall purpose. This issue of scope in my AIs first occurred with baboon hawks, and I am learning how to combat it. I need to clearly distinguish the purpose of something like a "happiness" meter--what impacts the meter, how does it impact the creature's behavior, are there feedback loops, does it affect other meters, and how does it serve the end result? The idea of a baby creature AI is so ripe with ideas like boredom and fear level and happiness and choosing favorites or disliked players, I had to decide on one or two things. I've decided on the baby getting scared and running away as the most fun mechanic.

The baby Maneater is maybe the most Upturned-coded Lethal Company creature. It not only reminds me of Shrimp but also of the Jacks, since it merges two entirely separate systems of the game (scrap/items and enemies). Sometimes it feels like a coin toss if an enemy will require lots of debugging and fixing for online play, because the hoarding bugs were almost fully functional in one try, while the Maneater was a nightmare to get synced for all players. But I survived with some of my sanity.

What is next?

I want to take a small break to avoid burnout, but now I wonder if taking a break would actually cause it. I'm going to keep my momentum going to release another update, then we'll see where we are at, since I may need to get a new computer. I had mentioned early this year that the summer would be a vibrant time for Lethal Company, and it seems like I was right.

I think the next update may be very focused on items and furniture--perhaps even the resurgence of store-bought utility items as an important mechanic? I am going to somehow address one of Lethal Company's design flaws, which is that useful items are too temporary to take up a valuable scrap-holding slot. A dedicated utility slot may be in order, but maybe I can think of something better than to artificially separate the two types of objects with two different inventories. Ick! Hopefully the next update will empower players to bring in items that are otherwise too niche. I would love one player on the crew to somehow carry a Worms-sized inventory of utility items.

Besides that I have an idea for another interior which is brewing in my brain, and right now it's fixating on the idea of windows. Glass

Welcome To The Dark Place is on the back-burner again, but that is okay. Sometimes it feels like some kind of swan song, and maybe that's why post-poning it has always brought me joy.