How to stay on track.

Hello. So where is Lethal Company now? It's been a couple weeks since I posted on its progress. For so long, I had a deep concern that the project had somehow gotten lost and would stay that way. But then I found out what was wrong.

A bit of context...

I described before how I wanted to find a way to make encounters with monsters feel "avoidable, yet inevitable" instead of just plain random, in a game that will be fully randomized. That's a puzzle.

And I figured out a way to do this, which was by giving players the ability to prevent monsters from spawning, as their spawns (like Minecraft mob-spawners) pop up as in a game of whack-a-mole. On paper this did everything: not only was it a great way for monsters to spawn procedurally, but it also encouraged players to isolate from each other. (I grinned when my tester friend said unironically, "Maybe we should split up?")

The problem: 

On its own, that idea could thrive. But Lethal Company is already a rogue-lite with randomly generated mazes, resource management, and a weird mechanic in which you grind a secondary objective each run until you can complete the overarching objective of the game in an "all or nothing" run. 

That's already so much that it's making my head spin! Oh yeah, I almost forgot it's an online multiplayer game for a reason.

I was trying to shove an entire video game into my other video game which already exists.

So now, monsters will emerge from vents at random. But they'll make a lot of clatter before they emerge, so you'll get to prepare. (There's no vents in this image, but that puddle there makes splishy noises when you step on it, and those pipes are quite randomized.)

To conclude...

Next week I might have something to show on Lethal Company's first monster, so stay tuned for that. I also just drew up a design for the game's adaptive music and ambience (which it dearly needs.) The project will get to breathe as I return to the parts which I am best at.

To me this was less of a lesson about "not biting off more than you can chew" and more about compromising your perfect game design so it can actually fit together.