Hey Employees!
As launch is just around the corner, we wanted to say hello a bit more and give you some insights into how Last Man Sitting has evolved and come to be. Our team at DoubleMoose is small, but mighty and although we aren’t with CoffeeStain anymore (shoutout to our amazing friends over there!), we also previously worked on titles such as Goat Simulator (which might explain our brains to you all honestly).
We thought the idea of swooshing around on office chairs and blasting stuff to pieces with guns was brilliant and when we spoke to KevKev, the original creator of Last Man Sitting, we knew there was something special here. It took a lot of work to get it to feel right though. An early issue we found was that the faster you moved, the more difficult it was to shoot accurately with your gun. It took a lot of iteration to get it to feel just right.
the original version of Last Man Sitting, created by KevKev!
Another thing that was a big challenge was doing both PvP and PvE. In PvP, our goal was for it to be fun and fair. While it's very difficult to perfectly balance PvP, we went for a different approach where the players that lose a round get powerups, which naturally balances the session and makes both winning and losing fun. This was the design decision that tied PvP together and once we implemented it, we started having a lot of fun playing the game in the office and got that feeling that we’d gotten something really right.
Once that gamefeeling felt right, we developed the PvE swarm mode in parallel with the PvP. We noticed that the power-ups could be shared pretty seamlessly between the two modes. What worked in PvP also worked well in PvE, and in the PvE swarm mode you could stack your power ups more. This resulted in more crazy and overpowered combinations, which resulted in more mayhem, which is what Last Man Sitting is all about!
Most of all, we'd say that the design has been rooted in a ton of playtesting on our end. Everyone on the team is regularly playing the game both in PvE and PvP, and we plan our work based on our own playtesting, and lately, the community feedback we get has been really helping us shape and balance things too.
We really love what we’ve built in Last Man Sitting and we can’t wait to share more with you when the game launches on March 31st! (But you can wishlist now if you want to be the best employee ever!)
Yours chairingly,
Team LMS