Overview
The good news is that the core gameplay loop and mechanics are now pretty firmly cemented in place.
There will obviously still be changes and iteration as development continues, but I’m very happy with where the game is now. The loop makes sense from a lore perspective, the mechanics feel intuitive, and it has the balance I wanted between co-op chaos and having enough room to breathe.
A lot of that comes from the scenarios inside each building, which are essentially the main events you take part in while exploring the city. They give players plenty to communicate about and work through together, without every moment needing to be loud or frantic.
The overall lore and story have also really fallen into place, which I’ll talk about more below.
Lore
The original idea for LIVING HELL was always based around the collapse of the ozone layer.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted the sun and extreme heat to be central to the world. That was eventually how I arrived at the name LIVING HELL, although there were a couple of other names before it, including Daybreak and Decay. LIVING HELL quickly felt like the best fit.
A lot of the main ingredients have actually stayed the same since those early versions. The abandoned city, the heat, the mutations, the subway and the idea of going outside when conditions were safer were all there.
The biggest problem was that I was trying to make everything too large and too open.
Originally, each district had a much bigger outdoor area with several buildings available at once. You might arrive at a station and have six different places you could potentially explore.
In theory, that sounded like freedom. In practice, players could easily get lost, there was never enough time to meaningfully explore everything, and a huge amount of work was needed to make all the empty space between those locations feel worthwhile. It became choice for the sake of choice.
The current version still gives the impression that you are moving through a large city, but each area is much more focused. You are not overwhelmed with places to go when most of them could not realistically be completed anyway.
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Nothing has really been lost by doing this. The same buildings and scenarios still exist, but each area now has more room to feel distinct and memorable. It has also made the game much easier to understand when playing as a team.
The story behind what you were doing in the city, and why, has changed a fair bit too.
At one point, the game was almost entirely about cooling. Players would recover coolant from buildings and use it to keep the air-conditioning systems running inside their safe room. If those systems failed, the room would overheat and eventually become uninhabitable.
It worked mechanically, but it started to feel like an extra chore at the end of every mission rather than something exciting.
In the current trailer on the store page, players communicated with an AI called DAWN-4o, operated by a government initiative called UREI. Your job was to travel into the city at night, recover samples from mutated life and submit the resulting data to the AI.
That eventually became an escalating research quota which had to be met every few days. I worked on a lot of different versions of that system. However, similar to the cooling mechanics, something just felt kinda mundane about it.
As the building scenarios became more developed, the reason for entering them became much clearer. The creatures, the specimens and the train now all connect to the wider journey through the city in a way that feels much more natural.
I do not want to explain exactly how that works, because discovering it is part of the fun! The important thing is that everything you discover has a clear purpose, and that purpose becomes more important as you move deeper into the city.
Power has also become a major part of what happens inside the buildings. Most of the electrical infrastructure had failed after lack of maintenance, so locations rely on emergency systems to function. An example of this is that building lights will frequently cut out, and players may need to locate and reset breakers to bring them back online.
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Lights ON :)
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Lights OFF :(
Combined with the dynamo flashlight I showed in the previous update, this creates a lot of situations where teams are suddenly separated or left in darkness at the worst possible moment. It adds a type of tension that I have not really seen used in quite the same way in other co-op horror games.
The interiors were procedurally generated during the earliest versions of development. Eventually, I realised that this was moving the game closer to what many other co-op horror games were already doing, when the whole point was to create something more authored.
Every building layout is now handmade. There is still variation between playthroughs, but everything takes place inside environments that have been deliberately designed rather than assembled from interchangeable rooms.
The gameplay has some similarities to DEVOUR in the sense that players are often completing different objectives and returning things to a central point. The difference is that LIVING HELL has been built to support much more variation between them.
Each creature can have its own unique behaviours, rules and objectives. That gives me a much broader foundation to build on than I had with DEVOUR.
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Prologue
I have always thought the game needed a proper introduction.
DEVOUR had short narrated sequences at the beginning of each map. They were usually only around fifteen or twenty seconds long, but I think they were more important than I realised at the time. They immediately set the mood, gave the location some context and made the game feel like it took its world seriously.
LIVING HELL has a much larger setting and story, so dropping players straight into the game without any context did not feel right. At the same time, I did not want everyone to sit through a long cinematic before they could start playing.
The result is a short playable prologue that lasts around one minute.
It is played alone and only introduces the most important information. It establishes the state of the world, your immediate objective and a few of the core mechanics without explaining too much or slowing things down.
Keeping it that short while still making it feel meaningful was surprisingly difficult, but I think I have finally nailed it.
I remember watching Valve discuss how the introduction to Half-Life 2 was not properly created until the rest of the game was largely understood. That makes complete sense to me now. It is difficult to know what the beginning of a game needs to communicate until you properly understand everything that follows it.
I have also added a cassette system to the game. Throughout the city, players can discover recordings left behind by former residents. These are the main collectibles and feature fully voiced conversations, messages and personal accounts from the period leading up to the collapse. Complete with lip syncing!
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Listening to a cassette recording
They are completely optional, but they allow players who are interested in the world to gradually piece together what happened without forcing everyone else to stop and read documents.
Respecting Players’ Time
A lot of modern co-op horror games are built around an open-ended loop.
Games such as Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. and Phasmophobia do this exceptionally well. You complete objectives, earn money or meet quotas, and continue until the game becomes too difficult or the team decides to stop.
Since those games became successful, a lot of similar systems have appeared elsewhere. In particular, the idea of a quota that increases every few days until it eventually becomes impossible has become very common.
That structure creates mystery and makes it feel as though a game could continue forever, but I also find it slightly exhausting.
One of the main things I have tried to consider throughout development is how much of the player’s time the game is asking for, and whether that time is actually being rewarded.
I am completely fine with someone finishing LIVING HELL over a few sessions, enjoying it and then deciding they are done. It does not need to be something people feel obligated to play every night forever.
Because of that, LIVING HELL now has a defined campaign (so-to-speak) with an actual end. This isn't a Resident Evil type campaign with a story, its still very much in the likes of other co-op horror games in its core gameplay loop, but it just gives the players a north star to follow. If you've played the demo for Invoykr, based on Jumanji, its somewhat like that but done in our own way.
A complete playthrough will probably take somewhere between two and four hours, depending on the team and how much they explore. You can save your progress and return later, so it does not need to be completed in a single sitting.
I personally find games much more motivating when I can see an endpoint ahead of me. Even if I fail, knowing that I made it slightly further than last time gives me a reason to try again.
Reaching the end also gives a much stronger feeling of satisfaction than simply continuing until the numbers become impossible.
A campaign does not mean every playthrough will be identical. Routes, buildings and scenarios can change, so the journey through the city will be different each time. The aim is to combine the replayability of a co-op horror game with the escalation and payoff of a more traditional campaign.
One of my favourite parts of DEVOUR was the underlying crescendo within each map. You began relatively safely, but every ritual object you destroyed brought you closer to the end and increased the intensity. LIVING HELL follows a similar idea, but across an entire journey rather than a single location.
Playtesting
I am somewhat nervous about opening the game up for playtesting.
Naturally, I want everyone’s first experience to be a perfect and finished version of the game. At the same time, I know how important it is to get feedback early.
There are still parts of the game that need to be balanced, tested and built out, and I want to shape those final parts with the community rather than waiting until everything is supposedly finished and discovering problems too late.
There will be some playtesting happening fairly soon. I’ll announce the details when I’m ready. Patreon subscribers will get access first, and the test will become public sometime afterwards.
Roadmap Update
There hasn't been a huge amount of movement on the Roadmap, despite the amount of work that has gone on over July. I would probably say the Core Gameplay Loop went back down to 70% and then back up to 95% all within this last month. Prologue was added, and a few things have had their Milestone changed so that we can get to Alpha sooner. A major thing I am working on at the moment which is taking a lot of my time is a refresh of the trailer which will feature a bunch of new footage not seen before.
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Changelog
Added the first version of the prologue.
Introduced cassette-based story scenes with actors, facial expressions, lip-sync, and camera effects.
Expanded the Depot with sleeping areas, a bathroom, new hallway and environmental details.
Reworked the train mechanics to be more centered around fuel-powered linear travel.
Updated train lighting, announcements and screen visuals.
Added new Shutter system in subway stations to be used as a ready check.
Renamed Gosford Heights to Gosford Village and expanded its streets, rooftops, subway exits, and stations.
Continued developing the Police Station.
Reworked logic for Abandoned players and how they get back into the game.
Improved creature movement, spawning, reactions, and their ability to enter or flee through windows.
Added rare large sizes of recoverable specimens.
Continued polishing player mutation, mutation recovery, related postfx visuals, animations, and interactions with the trains defensive systems.
Expanded the handheld tracker with teammate tracking, objective guidance, visual effects, and new animations.
Improved aiming animations for handguns and shotguns.
Added animations for crafting, drinking, flashlight charging, floor sitting, shaking objects, and dancing.
Added a simpler notification HUD and improved inventory, pockets, storage-grid, and controller navigation.
Added an orbital inspection camera with rotation and zoom.
Expanded saving to cover characters, health, thermal load, stored supplies, unlocked doors, persistent objects, and train progress.
Added more location- and scenario-specific music.
Polished lighting and effects across many aspects of the weather, especially around entering and exiting from subway stations.
Improved Ladder interactions.
Simplified several underlying systems to make future maps, routes, creatures, and scenarios easier to build.