Concise Development Diary #4

How are you? I'd like to give you some updates on the development : )

tldr; I'm working on distributing and balancing (a lot of) equipment and (a lot of) enemies throughout the game, and later on I'd like to have some beta testers.

So, I've finally finished all the locations that volunteers will go through during their mission in EMPTY SHELL 2, even the secondary ones : ).

But I'd like to make an important note about this: unlike the first EMPTY SHELL (which, with some adjustments, could work this way too), ES2 is built to be expanded indefinitely in terms of levels and missions, considering its extraction nature and the explicit presence of side quests. I chose this approach with the idea of significantly expanding the game after release, in the following weeks and months (and maybe even years, who knows... I'd be more than happy about that).

This doesn’t mean there will be little content at release, on the contrary, lately I’m starting to think I may have actually overdone it, ahah, and now I have to place it all properly.

Speaking of which: in the previous dev diary (#3), I mentioned that I would soon move on to side quests. In reality, I ended up switching tasks for an important reason: after so much design work, there comes a point where you need to see the game actually come together in a real, tangible form, something that’s actually playable in a final, realistic way. Basically, feeling the game more as a player than as a developer: )

For this reason, I'm moving forward one of the most important tasks in game development, what I call "distribution and balancing".

A few days ago, I created a massive spreadsheet containing all the areas and all types of enemies, from common ones to more challenging ones (excluding bosses, which for now are specific to certain rooms).

It's a slow process, mainly because it requires a sort of mega cross-testing from start to finish to understand how weapons, gadgets, credits, upgrades, etc. will properly handle the enemies encounters, both in quantity and difficulty, as the player progresses through the game. This is important to avoid situations with spikes of excessive ease or excessive difficulty (in EMPTY SHELL 1.0 this happened in The Woods, as some of you may remember), but also to avoid repetitiveness.

And precisely because distribution and balancing need proper testing, I'm considering a playtesting system, likely very limited, in order to get direct feedback from players, which is always the most valuable.

If anyone is interested, i will post an announcement on Discord when the time comes : ) (it won't be like tomorrow, but it's not that far off either)

I'll leave you with a gif that will show you for the first time the cousin of The Hand you already know: The Foot (that is heavier, but somehow faster).

See you soon, volunteers!