So, I’ve been spending time lately watching Dario Casali’s Half-Life playthrough series. He was one of the original level designers at Valve and watching him revisit HL1 while breaking down his design choices is an absolute goldmine.

It also made me realize something staggering about Half-Life: Pipes. They are everywhere. Industrial, rusty, plumbing glory running along every single corridor.

My immediate late-night thought was: "What if I could just draw a pipe directly inside the editor?"

So I added that.

It's basically the same idea as the door system I talked about in the last devlog. You draw the shape, hit a button and you've got a pipe. No need to make a 3D model and import it.

And then came the Turb Gun.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Tau Cannon, specifically that hypnotic little spinning mechanism in the middle while you charge shots. And I wanted that mechanical flavor in Guntlet.

The Turb Gun is rocking a small internal turbine that revs up and spins in real-time as you charge your attack. It's actually the first weapon in the game with a dynamic, self-contained animation.

...Oh, speaking of weapons, I also started working on the Chainsaw.

It’s raw, unpolished and not ready to be shown. But the core mechanic is already in: impalement. If catch another player dead-on, they get pinned in place, entirely helpless, while the teeth do the dirty work.

I'm sure this will lead to totally mature and responsible gameplay.

On the character front, I’ve been cooking up the female player model.

The first version looked pretty damn stupid, honestly. I was seriously considering dropping the idea but my wife likes playing female characters, so I gave it another shot.

It's much better now. Dario Casali mentioned in his playthrough that Half-Life's development relied often on a "you get the idea" philosophy. I'm still not a 3D artist, so there’s room for improvement, "you get the idea" is good enough for now.

A lot of the rest of the week has been the usual stuff: bug fixes, optimizations, improvements and a bunch of smaller things that aren't particularly exciting to talk about but make everything better.

The best news? The scales have finally tipped. I’m spending way less time building HyperCube (the engine) and way more time actually building Guntlet (the game). Right now, about 70% of my time is pure game dev.

This whole "Party Shooter" thing is starting to click in a big way. Every week I'm finding weird new ideas to throw in that emphasize the design philosophy.

There’s still a mountain of code to write, but for the first time, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the moment where I hand the build over to you guys, step back and watch the chaos unfold.

What crazy weapon mechanic should I steal from 90s-00s games next?