Dev Log #01 (Release v1.1.0)

I’ll preface that typing stuff in a non conversation like this feels super unnatural to me so this dev log might be a little weird and yappy but let’s ball. The intent of this little log is to keep everyone on the same page and document how things are going and see how it worked out in the future.

Past

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Quick little background on why this mod exists. I’m a post-graduate Game Designer who got into Lethal Company with my friends in early December and as a level design nerd with a background of programming in Unity I wanted to look into making my own Moons for the gabble to up my level design skills. After a week or two working with HolographicWing’s LethalExpansion I ran into a few limitations and missing features that I was interested in trying to get working myself. At the time HolographicWing’s wasn’t interested in collaboration just yet so rather than working on LethalExpansion directly I collaborated with SkullCrusher on an experimental version of LethalLib instead. This work was then separated into its own mod so I could release and manage more experimental and unstable builds without having to potentially cause instability in LethalLib and now we have LethalLevelLoader.

I wanna thank everyone for the support, collaboration and early adoption of LethalLevelLoader. Like seriously. As someone coming from a lack of professional education in programming the way the mod has blown up has been really hard to process. As of right now we’re sitting at 1.6 million downloads on the Thunderstore which is quite a lot more than my previous record of 0. This is my first major public project so it’s no surprise the initial versions had some pretty rough issues to work out but thanks to the community and other developers it’s been a fantastic way to work on my programming abilities and work out the best way to provide features to empower both developers and users to create and experience all this new content everyone has been producing.

Present

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So the first two weeks of LethalLevelLoader’s release gave me a ton of real time playtesting and a massive dump of extremely valuable feedback. For an API like this there’s only so much you can add when your just building features for yourself and predicting what people might want and use so as soon as people who aren’t you start playing with it you get hit with a wave of suggestions and issues that just make you wonder why you didn’t think of that. So after the initial two weeks of logging feedback and putting out the crucial fires (1.0.0 to 1.0.7) I decided to lock in and more or less remake the entire project. The reason for this is now that I have a stronger understanding of what LethalLevelLoader actually needs to do, I can design it in a way that does everything in a streamlined, consistent way, rather than making a bunch of small half measure fixes to put out new fires that emerge. This is especially true while the project is still fairly small and new so the time spent doing this was fairly small.

So 17 days since the last update and 32 days since initial release we now finally have a presentable build of LethalLevelLoader 1.1.0 (alexa play loot bug yippee mod). Versions 1.0.8 and 1.0.9 have been skipped because to be honest 1.0.0 - 1.0.7 really should have been considered 0.0.1 - 0.0.7. This new version is something I consider a proper, fully fledged version of the project and there’s a lot of evidence to justify it! This version alone has more features than the current version of the project, With at least 20 features and 30 bug fixes marked as complete on the project's Trello. This update addresses a bulk of suggestions and issues people have sent in, particularly in ensuring the changes to the base game LethalLevelLoader makes are as naturally compatible with other mods as possible and giving users and devs a strong set of options and features to use to configure their experience as much as possible. I’m sure there's going to be more fires to put out initially and I apologize in advance for any people run into.

Future

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Next I wanted to talk a bit about the future. The future of LethalLevelLoader, the future of me modding Lethal Company and the future of me somewhat as well.

In terms of LethalLevelLoader i’m going to be overhauling my development workflow to ensure I can release smaller bug fixes and patches in the future while separately working on larger requested features in the background (Multi-Dungeons, Seamless Level Loading, Dynamic Ship Landing Positions etc.). Ideally 1.1.0 would not have been built in a way that took three weeks without a single update and I want to ensure that doesn’t happen again in the future.

The number one priority for me after the 1.1.0 release is to do a major pass on documentation on how to use LethalLevelLoader and to work on Unity Editor tools to streamline, simplify and empower development of Lethal Company modding as much as possible. Due to the amazing work of developers like Nomnom. The process of setting up a working development environment for Lethal Company modding has been simplified drastically over the past week or so and I wanted to wait for these groundbreaking advancements before I put time into documenting the development process. I’ll be working with other developers and users to document every aspect of developing a custom level or dungeon, ensuring people of any age and experience can dip their toes into content creation.

I also really want to put some time into some other mods. The whole point of this project was to help me make the moons I wanted to make for my More Moons Mod and I have some ideas simmering in the back of my mind that I think are really going to impress the community with things they haven’t seen before. Doing this will also double as a public example for other developers looking for info on how to implement things in a fully developed level. There’s also some other smaller mods I’ve seen people suggesting a lot that I could easily implement now that I have a strong understanding of Lethal Company’s codebase and some foundations via LethalLevelLoader to help implement them.

Finally a tiny bit about me. As a whole my primary goal right now is to find my first position in the Games Industry as a designer or programmer. Currently I’m in a fortunate enough position to where I have the time to invest into projects like this to improve my development skills and create presentable portfolio pieces to showcase when applying to studios but as someone running up against the cost of living it is possible my circumstances could change to where I will be unable to continue working on Lethal Company related projects. As a few people have asked me, I'm going to be adding a Ko-fi link to anyone interested in supporting me in that way. I’m also open for commissions for the people interested in funding the development of various mod ideas (In terms of highly wanted LethalLevelLoader features or any other kind of Lethal Company mod)

That’s about it for the yapping. Going away from the 9th - 12th so full development will start back up again after that. Again massive thank you for everyone playing with, creating with and assisting with LethalLevelLoader.