Ey lads, long time no update! Let's crack open my notes and see what I've been up to since.... the start of December?!

Also while we are early on in this post here's a link to the game on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3354930/Junk_Sec/

And also my Patreon which I started up again and am trying not to think about

https://www.patreon.com/Shoehead

December

Steamdeck features!

The game has been configured to work on Steamdeck out of the box. Had to mess around with some screen size stuff on both my end and in Steamworks. It looks pretty good both in handheld and docked. The controls are still being reworked on controller because it turns out clicking the stick to run sucks ass on Deck!

Weapon spread, damage and enemy health overhaul.

Some of this was done in November but things got way tighter in December. Enemy health was scaled up and weapons now do mostly consistent damage instead of randomized TTRPG-like atk+diceroll vs def. There's still bonus damage for hitting weak points and random crits that do double damage so luck and aim are still factors. This had helped me out with pacing too, seeing as I can plan how much ammo each enemy will cost to beat. You still get knockdowns and can save on ammo by stomping heads, of course!

Speaking of aim, spread was really weird and it wasn't until I went and built a debug tool to display the potential spread of any one shot that I realized it was waaaaaaaaaaaay too wide, so it's been tightened up considerably, you're still going to screw up shots if you don't let your focus tick up but its not like you are firing like 20 entire degrees from your target.

Ammo Stacking

Something I never bothered to mention about the game before, but ammo you pick up is only half full, storing it and removing it from your stash allows you to have twice as much ammo in the same space in the inventory. Why did I do this? Not sure. But then I got thinking about odd amounts of ammo on each item and decided to let you merge and stack ammo up to that doubled amount just in your inventory anyway. To be nice. So now you can do a little on the spot cleaning.

Slopes!

SLOPES! THEY ARE HARD! THEY WORK

Bounce Pads!

They have no graphics atm but yeah get bounced son! They come with preset strengths and a diagonal version. I played a heap of Momodora right before setting this up (can you tell?) and currently have no plans on WHERE to use these but they are here!

Inventory Rotation!!

That's right the inventory went a whole year without this feature. I wasn't sure how to do it in 2023, but I got sick right before Christmas and was super busy and... just did it. Now you can fit as much crap in there as humanly possible.

January

The Shop!

That's right all the ui stuff for the shop is in and working, except for selling your own stuff, which I'll work on later. I'm really not sure when or where to start using the shop yet or if it'll be an NPC or some sort of vending machine. Lots to plan there, but at the very least you have somewhere to spend all that money.

This also marked the point were the game hit MVP! IT ONLY TOOK THREE YEARS WOOO

Arcing energy

This was an experiment in just... effects, it mostly works but has a buggy issue atm were sometimes instead of detecting a wall below it it'll clip through, I think I have a fix for that when I start to have these show up as actual hazzards in game though. I've no idea why I wasn't able to do it back in January I might have been distracted???

Lockpicking

I hate most lockpicking minigames tbh. Most of them are too fiddily, but I really came to like the hacking minigame from Warframe.  So I literally remade it myself. Things are super ugly and early atm. Picking locks requires using an electronic lockpick which can be found out in the world or bought in the shop and are single use.  It's basically my answer to small keys from Zelda.

Things will get weirder later with these, I wanna do different speeds and alternating directions and stuff towards the end of the game.

Puker

Made a zombie who pukes on you.  Don't let him do that.

February

Nail gun effect

Shower thought one morning. Why don't I let you nail gibs to the walls with the nailgun? By the end of the day you could. You can also nail the smaller crawler completely to a wall. 

Intro Area 

This took the rest of the month to work on. Basically the game as it was opened with you arriving inside the facility you're investigating with the company. I wanted to have you quickly move down from rooftop levels down to the street and on to the sewers top find the hidden elevator down. So I did that.

Only thing was, the naming convention for my maps and their coordinates on the minimap started at X1 so I had to shift everything over by like 11 or so rooms, which required batch renaming and resetting of their coords. Stupid work looking back on it.

On top of that I took the time to script out you landing on the roof and some interactions with the rest of the team as you move in. Hopefully this isn't boring as sin when people actually play, but it at the very least tutorialises platforming, ledge grabbing, switches, and lockpicking.  Plus now that I have all the tiles done for it, the whole area looks kind of sick.

That's it!

Small things

• A brazillion bug fixes
• Something close to 15 new rooms
• Gibs move differently in water
• Player now has the Magic Pixel, 1hp
• Player has more vocalisations, rolling, jumping and ledgegrabbing all have a sound
• The Crawler enemy got better AI and... can now see things to the right of them... oops
• Vertical Camera movement improved but still kinda weird
• Testing for rooms longer than double rooms
• Time since the last save is shown on the pause screen and the deathscreen
• The last temporary sounds that were borrowed from other games have been replaced
• 3 new cutscenes
• A bunch of interactions with the squad
• Facelifts for some of the more boring rooms from last year

Next up!

• Fighting your way to the armory, finding a pistol and more
• Finding a home for the shop
• The Canteen area
• It's all just content for the next little bit tbh!
• Another attempt at controller layout
• update all the tutorial stuff for controls