zeekerss

What did he see?

Added 2023-06-06 05:48:02 +0000 UTC

Hello, the past two weeks have been very eventful. For a lack of better words, the entire development of Lethal Company has been intense. I think I bit off just as much as I could chew; sometimes I feel overwhelmed with the game's problems (which is a truly dreadful feeling), but I keep pushing through it.

The first thing I did was add two new enemies to the game. One of these is a stand-out which could be the best one in the game, even after I add in the rest. It is one of the original enemy concepts which I created the game for, and it feels better to call it an antagonist.

Stuff, stuff, stuff!

Then I added in some unlockable stuff, like decorations for the ship and suits which are just a cosmetic change. This feels really necessary to me because even though it's silly and pointless, it provides some tangible, permanent rewards to mark your progress.

There's a vapid, materialist vibe to this, which is funny. It reminds me a little of My Little Inferno. In that game you were also purchasing pointless knick-knacks to make your cheap, dingy little fireplace feel like a cozy home (or to keep the fire burning while the world froze over.)

Some forced optimization

After that I encountered a scary glitch which blasted extremely loud noise--so loud that Windows (or my headphones) seemed to mute the game automatically. So this led to unfortunately having to remove Steam Audio from my project, which means no more binaural audio.

The upside is that the game runs five times as fast now (at a full 144 fps when it used to run at around 30). I thought Lethal Company just wasn't optimized somehow or is just too big, but it turns out the audio spatializer plugin was slowing it down. It seems more optimized than any of my previous games now!

Now I'm trying to add as much content as I can while fixing the game up to prepare it for the world. (That means adding tutorial pointers, improving the game flow, and fixing as many bugs as I can.)