Hi Folks,
Co-Director Joe here. We’re trying to get in the habit of posting regular updates about Good Boy progress as a way to keep ourselves accountable and moving forward. We’ve been quite busy lately.
On the art/level design side: We’ve been building more houses to loot. In active dev is a 3 story multi-family house, a manufactured-style house, and an entire heist based around a basement. There’s a lot that goes into making a new location to heist, and still a lot of new lessons we discover with each new location, but we think it’s fun getting to ransack new places. Speaking of items; we’re also tinkering with a fragility setting for them, so some things are more–well–fragile. This is kind of like a durability setting in some games, (except not at all, because people hate those so we named it Fragility to try and hoodwink everyone) but it’s more like a bias towards breaking, and not a “prop health meter”. Jokes aside, this is a game where stuff breaking is half the fun, so we imagine that things like item health and fragility will be an area of constant iteration.
This week we’ve also been laying the groundwork for unlock progression on masks. There aren’t many masks/heads in the game right now, but we’re going to add more, and we want the expansion of the pool to follow a logical progression as players explore the various heists. Similarly, we’ve been improving our objective pools. The builds now have a single primary objective per heist, as well as secondary ones—which are randomly drawn from the available goals for that heist. This is creating an interesting variety for each visit to a house, which we like.
On the tech side we’re working on improving item rotation and distance while carrying. This is also going to be a never-ending-fine-tuning project, we think. We are ok with some humorous jank here as it makes everything, in general, a bit more fun… but we do want a bit more polish than what we had previously. Finding the balance between polish and humor is tricky here, so if you’re in the playtest then please give us feedback! If you’re not in the playtest: go ask to be invited! We’ll regularly be adding new players to the playtest pool every so often, whenever we need a new batch of first impressions.
We’ve also been working on a bunch of internal tools; ways to help us set up new masks quickly, ways to analyze the loot that’s in a house to better balance objectives, ways to spawn horrifying monsters to come kill us so we can see how death feels… things like that. Speaking of… we’ve finally got the Dog up and running and terrifying us, but it’s still a bit early, so he’s not (or…shouldn’t be..we think) in the playtest yet.
And, lastly, on the character side, we’ve been tinkering with some new mob art and concepts. We’ll share those later, but they’re pretty fun. If you follow our weekly streams though, you may have seen some of the concepts I’ve been doing, and some of those have been a hit with the team.
See you all next week!