This Developer log is a little late! It was supposed to come out Friday. I got really sick for awhile, and am just recovering. This post will be a little shorter than normal.
After the news from this month, I will be talking about a few monster types we are implementing, and some general thoughts on how I want to implement our goal of having a ton of monster variety.

Things were slow last month in general. Mostly due to our usual nemesis: UI. Working on the user interface is both slow and not exactly thrilling. It is, however, really necessary. We want to get it right for this one, as being able to have an easy to modify UI saves a lot of time down the line

We have just started a bigger "Friends and Family" playtesting, to hammer out online bugs. After that is looking good, we're doing limited testing to our Discord[discord.gg]. After that, we're starting to accept testers from Steam, plus more testers from our Discord at random.

New things since last month:

• Lots of extra work on UI

• Fine tuning zombie behavior, optimization, and tracking

• Work on other monster types

Things we're doing currently:

• More UI stuff

• Stat and resource tracking

• Lots of online testing

After some delays this month, I'm hoping to have a bunch of news on where we are in playtesting next Devlog, with more videos posted before then to our usual channels at the bottom of this post.

We focused on fleshing out three enemy types last month. One that will become a Major Enemy group, and two Secondary Enemies.

Zombies are much faster than the previous zombies I designed. We decided to go for the sci-fi videogame zombie, instead of the Romero Zombie. Players are a lot stronger now, so zombies have to be more intimidating, too. They are more inspired by the Half-Life 1 headcrab zombie, and we also parody the concept a lot in-game.

Currently, they damage you be just touching you with their claws. We're going to change that soon, so that they require a windup of actually slamming their claws down on you. It will still be fast. Currently, something like a crowbar will just barely outrange them.

Once they get close to you, with their claws out, their speed increases immensely. When they're further away, they're still fairly slow. It's not quite a run. I'd call it a speedy shuffle.

YES, we're finally doing special zombies. Sort of. Not quite the Left4Dead ones. You'll see later!

Not exactly rare themselves, but usually either in special rare locations, or mixed with another enemy group. Commonly rampaging on a scientific or pharmaceutical station.

The medium ones take awhile to actually land their attacks. The small ones can't actually hurt you, but it's hard to walk on a living carpet of them.
Not a huge problem. Unless there's 300 of them. Or the BIG one is spotted.

A more rare enemy group. Loves power sources. Rubbery. Will mess up a ship FAST. Has a really horrible gimmick that may also be really useful.

We want a very large variety of monster types in this game. I want to really capture the early Sci-Fi horror experience of:
"What's that weird alien?"
\[Entire crew dies]

Players should have to adapt to new experiences, and ideally, even players with many hours in the game should get surprised by some new threat.

The plan is to have a good amount of Major enemy groups, currently six. As you go through the game, the plan is to also introduce more and more enemies to the Major Enemy groups. A Major Enemy group will seem simple in the early game, and will keep throwing new things you have to deal with as you get closer to the Space Dingus. Even the Crab Zombie faction will feel a lot different as you keep playing, as opposed to just going for increasing sizes to the horde (which will also happen.)

Then, we want as many smaller monster groups that we can think of. These are the Secondary Enemies. They will be usually be rarer than the main enemy groups and/or tied to specific locations. We will have different categories of rarity, so there's some that should be big surprises even if you've played a lot. Some of which I want to be more of a hazard or even puzzle, though the latter is often hard to do well.

Next Dev Log will be on February 27th. It will be about February's development news, and our experiences with initial playtesting. Then I will talk about how close I think we are to Steam Playtesting. We're getting there, it annoys me how close we are.

As always, thanks for reading! You can see more frequent news posts in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord[discord.gg], and on the site formerly known as Twitter.

In this Developer Log, I am going to talk about our progress towards the Steam Playtest and what we're doing next. Then below that, a big section on the current state of our Space Stations.

New things since last month:

• Massive optimizations. 120+ FPS with 200 zombies onscreen + tons of gore. We still want to do further optimizations, but this is a really big breakthrough

• More work on interactibles, smashable, and lootable objects

• More sound implementation

• New door logic and types

• Extra work on the locations, such as new room types, new layouts, and more

Things we're doing currently:

• Another big pass on zombie behavior and AI

• More UI stuff

• More work on tracking stats/resources

My estimate for the first playtest: Likely late January for a very small one. After that, if things go well, we will start ramping up towards letting people in from both Steam Signups and random selection from the Discord.

A lot of our time since last developer log has been spent on optimizations and Zombie AI work. This left a lot of extra time for adding to the current locations.

We've polished our existing locations, while adding new room types and layouts. We've also started work on another location type.

When you're fighting through a location, there's rooms you want to keep an eye out. There are Loot Rooms that stand out, and also even bigger, more rare Prize Rooms.

Where astronauts grow their French Fries. A great source of food, and sometimes weirder stuff.

Bright glowing green rooms, often found in the crowded and dark maintenance passages on a station.

Weapons, ammo, contraband. Often also the location of Security Overrides, a way to disable locked doors on a ship without resorting to cutting the power.

Storage for the medical supplies you need to heal your crew. Can sometimes have medical-related tools, or computers you can access for Research Data.

Tastefully decorated. Could have a wall safe, or a keycard laying around, along with whatever supplies the person in charge left here before being eaten.

Our main location type right now is the YM Corporation Derelict Station. These locations are a grab-bag of random loot types and resources. Different corporations will focus on different types of resources and have different quirks, but YM is very generalized.

We have a few different layout types for YM, but below is one layout type, with the Lockdown variant. The gifs show examples of different random generations of this.

The above is just part of the station, leaving out most of the maintenance access. The maintenance tunnels are where you'll have to explore to find a way to break the station's lockdown for this layout type, opening valuable doors.

We have different layout types for the overall shape of the station, along with further changes depending on what the mission variant is. A recent one we added is a Ruined version where there's lots of rubble and lighting is mostly destroyed, so you should bring a flashlight. We are currently finishing up a Keycard based variant.

We're currently working on a new location theme and type, Placebo Pharmaceuticals. This location type focuses on medical supplies, medical based items, and a new resource: Research Data.

Placebo Stations also tend to be much brighter than the YM Derelict Stations. No flashlights necessary (usually). The general layout will be much different than YM's, and you'll tend to see a lot of escaped lab animals as the usual monsters.

Next Dev Log will be on January 30th. At that point, I'm hoping to be able to talk to you about our first (very small) Steam Playtest, with some early estimate on when we'll do a more public wave. It all depends on how that initial limited playtest goes.

The main topic for the next developer log will be about Zombie AI, and about some of the monster types we're working on and planning.

As always, thanks for reading! You can see more frequent news posts in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord[discord.gg], and on the site formerly known as Twitter.