Development Blog - Taking a break, Proximity Mines, Destructible Voxels

Stress

In our first ever Patreon post I mentioned that I wanted to feel comfortable opening myself up. In our Discord server I am not often one to speak about what is going on in my life as I consider myself a rather private person. I think I have reached a certain boiling point where I feel like it’s best to start expressing myself and explain what is going on lately, because I think I am going to drive myself insane if I keep things to myself any longer.

On December 14th, we were all casually working on Selaco like we always did. Outside of a few playtesters, nobody knew about this game yet and we weren’t planning to go public anytime soon. While the product was shaping up amazingly well, we felt like it was not quite presentable yet, there were too many placeholders and other things that were not quite there yet. After thinking more and more about it, I got the idea to open up a Twitter page and start showing screenshots every now and again. The game might not be ready, but who cares, a first tweet never gains much traction anyway. I wanted to slowly build up an audience as time went on, and once a decent audience has been reached, release a trailer to get a ball rolling. I booted up the game, took a screenshot and shared it in the developer chat.

‘’Should we just post this on Twitter and announce Selaco today?’’ I asked in the developer chat, completely out of the blue. We decided to just do it. Fuck it. What do we have to lose? The game might not be exactly according to our vision yet, but it will be by the time we have a decent audience

I put the tweet out there, not expecting much traction because it was our first ever tweet. I remember going to the bathroom and hearing my phone go absolutely haywire upstairs. Constant loud vibrations of my phone resting on my wooden desk upstairs. ‘’It’s probably just a bunch of Discord DM’s’’ I thought to myself. I took a bottle of cola from the fridge and went back to the office.

When I got back I took a look at my monitor and managed to get a feeling of shock. I had to do a double take. ‘’20+ notifcations’’ according to Twitter. ‘’Yeah this is spam, has to be” After clicking on notification button, it turned out to be a ton of retweets, likes and comments because people liked the screenshot we posted. People with rather large audiences like Gianni Matragrano and Civvie11 saw the tweet and shed a light on it.

As time went on, the tweet managed to reach a 1000 likes within 3 hours. For an account that had literally 0 followers, that is absolutely huge. At the end of the day, we managed to hit 2000 likes on the tweet, and a 1000 followers in total. 2 weeks later, we had 2000 followers. Less than a month later we had 3000. It just kept going. A few websites even began talking about us and people were genuinely excited according to the reactions. I was extremely grateful and happy with how well things were going for the project. We celebrated, but it did not take long before something else came knocking.

Stress started to introduce itself. While being the lead developer of Selaco, I am also on an internship for university and had important exams coming up. Selaco had to keep moving forward, but my internship and exams were giving me a lot of additional pressure. I fought through it. I did both things fulltime and worked till 4am on multiple occasions and got back up at 9am to work non-stop. My days literally involved around nothing but work. I even skipped dinner on multiple occasions and haven't opened Whatsapp, an app that I use to stay in contact with friends, for multiple days.

Now, it has reached the point where it is started to eat away at me. Ever since our reveal on December 14, I have been working non-stop on this game. My body is giving me signs that it is time to slow down and take a breather, because I feel that anxiety is starting to kick in. Waking up is especially troublesome at times, where negativity will not escape my mind. I am usually a very positive guy, but lately I feel like that side of me is slipping away.

I have decided to slow things down. I won’t stop working on Selaco completely, but the hours have gotten inhuman and they cannot go on any longer. It is important to know that I never involved my team into this crunch. They have a list of things they can work on and everything on there is reasonable and very do-able on top of a full-time job. I took it upon myself to work this hard because I was (at the time) the only programmer on board and things simply had to keep moving.

For the weeks to come, I’ll spend time fixing bugs and apply some general polish to the game, but the intensive stuff is going to be put on hold. Around august, when my internship is over, I’ll get back to full-time development on Selaco again. But with reasonable hours. Which is easy, because I won't have exams and an internship to deal with then.

A while back someone in the Discord Server asked what important lesson I had learned during the development of Selaco. "I don't have anything noteworthy", was my answer. I have trouble being honest about how I feel, especially publicly. The one thing I have learned from Selaco is one that applies to life in general:

If you ever feel anxious; know that there is no shame in slowing down and that is okay to take a break.

I hope you can understand this decision. I am grateful that Patron allows the project to keep moving forward even when I am not around. We have plenty of awesome stuff coming, and as usual, I will share most of the things as they come. I am thankful that you decided to stick around with us! 

Now, on to the good stuff!

REMEMBER: GIFS DO NOT LOAD ON MOBILE!

Proximity Mines

Selaco is meant to give the player a choice in how they approach their encounters. Up until now, we have put a lot of focus on tools for the player to fight more offensively (Grenades, Ice Bombs, Gas), but didn’t put nearly enough focus into more defensive playstyles. We have a few fun tools in mind that we will absolutely get back to later on. For now, lets talk about our new toy: Proximity Bombs.

This was a fun one. Back in the Project Ominous (Selaco's old project name) days I added functional proximity mines but scrapped it because it did not fit with the pace of the game. Ominous was about pushing as much as you can, while Selaco is a bit more tactical where playing defensively is often the best approach. This lead to the decision to add more defensive options to the player.

Proximity Mine ammo can be found in the later levels of the game and come in packs of 3. After throwing, the Proximity Mine will arm itself after 2 seconds. A beeping sound will signal the player that the mine is activated, along with a blue pulsing light. The EXON label on the mine ensures that the mines are of high quality, and therefore will not explode when the user gets near it. Rather, it only detonates when a non-civilian / ACE Security Guard happens to get near the mine.

Thrown the mine but changed you mind? You can pick them back up again by pressing USE.

Mines *can* be used offensively, but due to the limited throwing range and the 2 second arming time, it is not often encouraged. This is where enemy Voice Over comes into play. If you hear that the enemy is pushing, start tossing mines around. Thank me later!

Light Switches

Most rooms in Selaco will have light switches. What is the point? Nothing. But with Selaco's rule to make everything as interactive as possible, light switches were a must. In some office area's, you can even close the shutters to hide from the enemy. Good fun! The demo level will have a few of those.

Destructible Voxels

Because who doesn’t love breaking things? I often boot up Selaco just to shoot at props before heading back to work. It’s great!

That's it for this week. We have some fun things planned over the coming week! Including Jerry's approach to Texture creation, Borion's voxel workflow and...Music! We finally got around to adding Safe Rooms to the world of Selaco and it comes with a very pleasing tune. Can't wait to share more.

Like I mentioned above, thank you so much for supporting us! You have no idea how much of a positive effect Patreon has on the quality of this game.

- Wesley de Waart