This Developer log is a little late! It was supposed to come out Friday. I got really sick for awhile, and am just recovering. This post will be a little shorter than normal.
After the news from this month, I will be talking about a few monster types we are implementing, and some general thoughts on how I want to implement our goal of having a ton of monster variety.
Things were slow last month in general. Mostly due to our usual nemesis: UI. Working on the user interface is both slow and not exactly thrilling. It is, however, really necessary. We want to get it right for this one, as being able to have an easy to modify UI saves a lot of time down the line
We have just started a bigger "Friends and Family" playtesting, to hammer out online bugs. After that is looking good, we're doing limited testing to our Discord. After that, we're starting to accept testers from Steam, plus more testers from our Discord at random.
Road to Playtest
New things since last month:
Lots of extra work on UI
Fine tuning zombie behavior, optimization, and tracking
Work on other monster types
Things we're doing currently:
More UI stuff
Stat and resource tracking
Lots of online testing
After some delays this month, I'm hoping to have a bunch of news on where we are in playtesting next Devlog, with more videos posted before then to our usual channels at the bottom of this post.
Current Monster Development
We focused on fleshing out three enemy types last month. One that will become a Major Enemy group, and two Secondary Enemies.
Major Enemy Group: Crab Zombies
Zombies are much faster than the previous zombies I designed. We decided to go for the sci-fi videogame zombie, instead of the Romero Zombie. Players are a lot stronger now, so zombies have to be more intimidating, too. They are more inspired by the Half-Life 1 headcrab zombie, and we also parody the concept a lot in-game.
Currently, they damage you be just touching you with their claws. We're going to change that soon, so that they require a windup of actually slamming their claws down on you. It will still be fast. Currently, something like a crowbar will just barely outrange them.
Once they get close to you, with their claws out, their speed increases immensely. When they're further away, they're still fairly slow. It's not quite a run. I'd call it a speedy shuffle.
YES, we're finally doing special zombies. Sort of. Not quite the Left4Dead ones. You'll see later!
Secondary Enemy Group: Skrats
Not exactly rare themselves, but usually either in special rare locations, or mixed with another enemy group. Commonly rampaging on a scientific or pharmaceutical station.
The medium ones take awhile to actually land their attacks. The small ones can't actually hurt you, but it's hard to walk on a living carpet of them.
Not a huge problem. Unless there's 300 of them. Or the BIG one is spotted.
Secondary Enemy Group: Amoemorphs
A more rare enemy group. Loves power sources. Rubbery. Will mess up a ship FAST. Has a really horrible gimmick that may also be really useful.
Monster Variety
We want a very large variety of monster types in this game. I want to really capture the early Sci-Fi horror experience of:
"What's that weird alien?"
[Entire crew dies]
Players should have to adapt to new experiences, and ideally, even players with many hours in the game should get surprised by some new threat.
The plan is to have a good amount of Major enemy groups, currently six. As you go through the game, the plan is to also introduce more and more enemies to the Major Enemy groups. A Major Enemy group will seem simple in the early game, and will keep throwing new things you have to deal with as you get closer to the Space Dingus. Even the Crab Zombie faction will feel a lot different as you keep playing, as opposed to just going for increasing sizes to the horde (which will also happen.)
Then, we want as many smaller monster groups that we can think of. These are the Secondary Enemies. They will be usually be rarer than the main enemy groups and/or tied to specific locations. We will have different categories of rarity, so there's some that should be big surprises even if you've played a lot. Some of which I want to be more of a hazard or even puzzle, though the latter is often hard to do well.
Next Up
Next Dev Log will be on February 27th. It will be about February's development news, and our experiences with initial playtesting. Then I will talk about how close I think we are to Steam Playtesting. We're getting there, it annoys me how close we are.
As always, thanks for reading! You can see more frequent news posts in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord, and on the site formerly known as Twitter.