2024-10-03:

Hi, I'm writing this to try to keep myself sane. And maybe it's also interesting to read.

I've been working on v2 for like a month now, maybe two, and there's this very weird divide between how it's going and how I feel about it. How it's going is: amazing. Last week I figured out a decent way to do the Golden Ticket functionality and this weekend I made its texture and learned how to do UV mapping, which I never thought I'd learn so soon, and yesterday I finally managed to get the Gold Crown's launch functionality to a functioning (enough) level.

Both are things that, when I first started, I said to myself: "There's no way. This is impossible. I won't be able to make this." But here we are, and I'm now (7 in the morning btw) making the Gold Crown's model. And despite it very clearly showing my unbridled inexperience with Blender, I'm content with it.

Again, I'm writing this to keep myself sane, as I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself to make v2 better than what I can realistically make it. Goldscrap's "success" kind of overwhelmed me. It was a pretty generic idea that was poorly, poorly executed (it was made in my first month of learning how to code; my mods before that were a CustomSounds mod I somehow messed up and a boombox mod I didn't know how to write variables to...), so I expected it to be a fun one-and-done kind of idea people would see through after like a week.

But here we are, 200.000 downloads and a lot of experience under my belt later. My smaller mods this past summer (LondonLoopCruiser/WeightOfLife/PlaylistsMod) were in a sense all preparation for this mod's v2. I tried tackling one small problem at a time to learn things like MonoBehaviours, managers, and even just how the heck to work in Unity because, again, I only started learning/teaching myself how to do all this four or five months ago. Modding has really taken an important role in my life, as I feel it filled the gap that my (game dev (or at least they say so)) college just straight-up didn't fill at all. But thanks to that, I've also unapologetically been overworking myself lately.

Maybe that's not a fun detail, but I'm trying to be honest here. To me, this update is not just an update for the sake of more downloads, or to correct my past mistakes from v1, or to show how cool and awesome and cool I am. It's a sort of sense of self I try to feel by delivering ideas such as the Gold Crown and Golden Glove (which I have yet to start with) that I have in my head and want to put a smile on people's faces with. Like, the Gold Crown is just ripped from Super Mario 3D World because I want to translate its fights over the crown to Lethal Company's literal murder you have to perform to steal the crown. In my head I really imagine these hilarious scenarios of people killing the crown-wearer, looking at where it's gonna land, and then all rushing to try to get it. I really hope it'll be as fun as it is in my head.

Anyways, train's reaching its final destination. Thanks for reading. I know I'm just gonna hide this under the Wiki tab. But if you cared enough to read, well I can't express my thanks to you personally, but thanks for caring. I'll try to make v2 as fun as it can be.

2024-10-05:

Hi again, looks like I'm gonna try to make this a habit after all. Though you might have noticed I already missed yesterday, sorry. You might also notice I apologize for things I really don't have to, sorry about that too.

But yesterday was a day in which multiple things I've been looking forward to for a long time came together. I just finished the Cat o' Gold unlockable and its Gold Fever secret weather.

The Cat o' Gold was initially planned as just a normal piece of furniture, with the only thing setting it apart being its moving arm. That's not all too special, but it was my first ever attempt at animating a 3D object in any way. Luckily, my previous experience with video editing made working with keyframes easy to get into, and Unity's Transform and AnimationCurves were also familiar enough for me to get going immediately. So I think the biggest timesink was creating its horribly misshapen model (for which I hope I won't have to apologize to the japanese for...). Although I've accepted that I shouldn't try to make every aspect of my mods perfect, and that maybe it looking so horrid is part of the charm. It's all just steps on my learning path.

Then for the Gold Fever weather that I hooked up to unlocking the Cat o' Gold. I'd planned this during my initial brainstorm months ago, and never really found a use for it. Then at some point, I don't even know why, I thought of linking it to the cat. And this was the kind of moment where something just clicked that convinced me to go through with it.

Implementing the weather itself was surprisingly easy too, only took 3 hours or so, mostly needing to figure out the how rather than the details. Then the final step was to introduce this mechanic in some way. For this, I decided to group it with the Directory-LOG instead of with the normal furniture, and made its info-terminalpage describe that it would change something gameplay-related too, to hopefully be clear enough without just writing "buying this unlocks a new weather", that would just be blunt.

Speaking of writing, I also decided to fully lean into another ridiculous personality for the cat, this time an over-the-top anime character/villain/deity. The Directory-LOG's old man-personality was already a fun exercise, but for this one I decided to just full-send it, and I love writing these kinds of method-acting pieces of text. I rewatched DougDoug's Advice For Content Creators video, and I think his advice helped me make decisions like this, to unapolagetically fully lean into ideas like this that other people probably think are ridiculous. Had I made these ideas more normal, I think it would be found more "palpable" by more people, but inversely less "great" by the people who do really like it. I'm trying to find my creative voice, and this feels like a very natural path to follow.

Anyways, this log is turning out to be massive. Again, sorry for that. There's only 5 store items left planned now, so the finish line is slowly becoming a dot on the horizon. Sorry if v2 took much longer than hoped, and if the wait dampened anyone's excitement, but I'm super proud of how all my learnings are translating into such silly ideas, so I hope the update's managed to put a smile on your face so far.

2024-10-08:

Hello again. Past few days I've been making slow but meaningful progress. Over the weekend I finished the final touches to the Cat o' Gold and Gold Fever weather. Yesterday I prioritized other (non-modding) work, but still managed to get basically the entirety of the new Cuddly Gold functionality ready, which was a major small victory for me, as I really didn't know if I'd go through with that, and did want to rework five items from v1, and thus now reached that quota.

And after finishing the new Cuddly Gold functionality, I went back and wrote tons and tons and tons of text for the Directory-LOG. It seemed logical, given that these new unexplained features were now in the game I would need a way of communicating them somehow. That's one thing I luckily picked up from my (so-called) game development college: You can't personally be there at every player's house who's gonna play your project, so you have to make the project do the talking for you. And that's what I'm prioritizing currently by finishing the Directory-LOG. I believe every major item mechanic is now explained, and I even added a tutorial/introduction that will be shown when you first read its text after having bought it, so I believe everything's come full circle. The only thing left is writing the filler ramblings, which are luckily the most fun to write, and testing it to make sure that it all works. After which I won't have to look back at it anymore.

(Side note the Directory-LOG and this dev diary are making me think I might like writing more than I thought haha)

And speaking of playtests, tonight I'll be playing again with the group of friends I've mentioned a few times in my Credits paragraph under my mods. They're really nice people, and they're even helping beta test v1.9.0, so I'm really really thankful for that. I think honestly, and I'm keenly aware I haven't yet made and published any games and am thus probably just not as good as I like to think, but I think the biggest thing that helps move forward with making a game/project/mod like this is that you gotta be able to envision the people playing it. If you can't hold a vision of someone else having fun playing with and experiencing what it is that you are making, then it'll be exponentially more difficult to work towards a reality that follows such a vision.

So... yeah, I dunno, I need more experience under my belt (bag haha funny reference) before I should be allowed to make any calls on what is "good" design. But just like what I said at the end of the last dev diary, I hope you've been having a lot of fun with v2 so far. Maybe you've only been having moderate fun. That's fun too! But it is a shame that I couldn't mean more to you yet.

But, as soon as I stop writing forgetful old man ramblings, the final leg is really gonna start: Gold Safe, Goldfather Clock, Gold Medal, Gold Trophy, and finally, the one I've been looking forward to for so, so long, the Golden Glove. All planned and I can't wait to get my hands on 'em, so here goes!

2024-10-13:

Hi. As you might be able to tell, I've been busy.

This week I not only had a lot of other work to give priority to (oh woe is me), but I also decided to really knuckle down on the Directory-LOG and get it to a fully finished state, and I'm glad to say I did. I managed to write all its 80+ paragraphs of different combinations of dialogue, and I thought of the Gold Scrap Score system on a whim which, to me, really ties it all together. I want every single one of the features from the Gold Store to be meaningful; to have at least some reason for buying it. The dlog (yes I'm tired of typing the whole thing lol) was a decent hint system to me, but I could see it too easily becoming annoying for other people. The "old man"-joke would not be appreciated by everyone, nor would it stay funny to people who did appreciate it, so for those people I had just put a 60-credits paywall on the gold scrap scan, which is not interesting enough I believe. The Score system makes up for this because it also incorporates elements that the dlog already used under the hood such as distance, but otherwise stayed untouched. So with the score system, you'll even reap some of these benefits without having to read all that text (though without giving all information away, reading the dlog is still theoretically the most informative). So, as you can see, I have been thinking about this system a lot, haha.

However, it was also a reminder that sometimes schedules just can't be followed, because something takes longer than expected, and that you have to make tough decisions. In 'traditional' game development with a deadline, this is where we would start scrapping, and only take the best features forward. But who cares, this is modding. So, the decision I made was to simply push the Safe Box (the Gold Safe got a name change because not EVERYTHING is made of gold) and Goldfather Clock back. A decision that only leads to longer development time, but to, I believe, higher quality.

And as for the Safe Box, it's development was also interesting. I basically started with the scariest thing to me: animating it. The Cat o' Gold was just a default Unity Animation Curve, but I knew I'd need to be able to trigger different animations depending on specific things such as opening, closing, or slamming shut if anyone is inside the safe (quick note, this 'trapping people inside'-thing I also decided to be a major mechanic of this feature for the sheer hilarity of it, which informed all my other decisions to not just make it a normal, boring storage box). And I'm happy to say that, after a lot of back and forth between reference material, I now understand these different animation transitions too, as well as Animation Events, which are just more exciting tools under my belt for the future.

In fact, the animation went so smoothly that I primarily spent my time on tweaking its colliders (sorry if you still get stuck inside), figuring out how to do the saving of items inside (sorry if it breaks like uhhh everything oops), and balancing the variables for things such as how many items can be stored (sorry if it can't save as many items as you want but also not sorry). I don't think anything is perfect right now, but maybe that's okay. It's made me think that maybe it's more charming that way, and I've found peace with keeping it like this. So, I'm deciding to leave this as it is, and will next start work on the Goldfather Clock, which should hopefully be a little easier too.

(P.S. I thought the dlog and safe would be easy too so who knows maybe that clock's gonna drive me up the wall as well lmao)

2024-10-20:

Hey guess what happened...

Okay, no, in all seriousness. I did indeed spend the entire week on the Goldfather Clock. I also had a ton of other work and stuff to do outside of modding, which is... healthier, and I shouldn't feel bad about that (I'm a pretty bad workaholic ever since I started modding lol), but I also really underestimated how easy the Goldfather Clock would be to make. But there's a timeline to how I got here, so let me explain...

I started with realizing that I had no clue what the clock should even look like. All I knew about grandfather clocks was that they were clocks and that they had a swinging pendulum. So, to be a bit more professional, I started with doing research, gathering references in a document, and making sketches and notes of what I would want the clock to look like.

Here the first cause for my underestimation of time already started: I found out how cool grandfather clocks kind of are. I had no idea they had lunar clocks indicating the phases of the moon, and I wasn't aware that the weights inside the cabinet had a function either. By doing research I both found out what I needed to make and, in a sense more importantly, what I wanted to make. Because now I knew that I loved the idea of giving it a lunar clock too, and giving the weights an actual function. The research phase helped support the "ideas"-phase, not the "making"-phase.

Then I finished a simple sketch of what I wanted my version of the clock to look like (core features: tall, slim, mounted on wall, birdhouse roof, open cabinet), so the next step was modelling it. Here another cause for the underestimation occured: This would likely be my most complex model yet. Let's be honest, if you've seen the Golden Throne, it's basically just a glorified cube (and come on the Safe Box IS a cube). But for this I would need to take a gamble and make it more complex. And so I did. In blender, I took more time to model the different edges and insides of the clock. I also kept in mind what I said last week of how maybe it's more charming if it's less professional, so I didn't try to shoot for the stars but just... make it look good enough.

Then a bunch of other stuff happened, but halfway through the week I got to the dreaded animations. My plan was to keep it simple, just have all animated parts be child GameObjects that I move the Transforms of with AnimationCurves. Easy. However, cause #3: I, uh... maybe kind of without planning it learned how to rig. And this was hilarious too. At my college we have a whole discipline for visual arts. Never heard a word from any of their teachers, but rigging? Of course I learn rigging from a programmer who just happened to sit next to me. He explained the whole process to me, really cool and nice of him.

However, #4: It didn't work. Something went wrong with importing into Unity. I still don't fully know what, but I decided that it was losing me too much time, so I switched back to the old method I first thought of. That went pretty well, and I had the first versions of the animations ready later that evening.

Everything else that happened afterwards went by in a flash, and every step was just so cool: finalizing the animations, finding audio for the clock, figuring out how to mount it on the wall, freaking UV wrapping and drawing textures for the clock face and weight chains. That last part was so... SO gratifying. Again, learning how to do the visual side of game development is really really cool. And I'm very glad that, with this mod, I have a place to learn it without too many risks.

But that's enough for now, this log has gone on for long enough, haha. Right now, I have a bit of a break from modding planned (because boy howdy I am tired), but when I get back I hope to get some quick momentum again. The Gold Trophy should just be a model, only have to create and UV wrap it, and the medals should be the same, albeit with figuring out how to put them on the player model and sync them to other players. Let's hope it doesn't take a full week again...

2024-10-22:

Hi, figured I'd do a quick in-between update to get what's happened off my mind.

So, first of all, the Gold Trophy was indeed just a model, a UV wrap, and a Box Collider. Done in a few hours. All I had to figure out was how Lethal's placeable ship objects actually work (which I luckily finally do now, so I can make future furniture faster too), but that was pretty much completely done yesterday.

Today, however... My day started off poorly. Long story short, there's a game I've been wanting to 100% for a year after only having 99% in it, but I accidentally deleted all that progress because apparently the New Game and New Game Plus buttons just had to be different things. Then, out of frustration, I just booted my mod back up to take my mind off of things, and started on the Gold Medal. I started with the model, honestly did bare-bones research, but just got to work making it, and I was done with that in about half an hour. Then I got to the part I was dreading: wearing and synchronizing medals.

But, here's where my day turned around: I actually managed to finish that all within less than 2 hours. I just had to do some digging to find where on the player character to display it, what object to parent it to, and in what order they would need to be synchronized to clients. But it really only took a few hours to get it working and synced.

There's stuff I still want to change about it, such as the frame not being in the ship when you have no medals unlocked. But if there's something I've learned from this, it's to just have some confidence every once in a while. I'm an extremely anxious person, and as I said I was dreading making this, but seeing how far I've come just by having the courage to tackle problems instead of walking away... It's instilled a bit of confidence in me. And I hope that, if you care enough to read this and maybe feel the same, know that I started with a failed CustomSounds mod too (a mod that does ALL the work for you btw). So if I can do it, so can you!

There's ironically an ad that bothers me that I've been getting, where some woman says something along the lines of "I believe that, if you do anything with conviction, it will be good", and you know what, she might be onto something.

2024-10-27:

Hi again- hey btw thanks for reading these. You really didn't need to, seeing as I uhh... don't know what I'm doing lol, but thanks for having enough of an interest in my work in order to also read these ramblings.

And today's rambling is all about the Golden Glove. And I think the biggest learning point from this is that, the more daring of a feature you try to make, the more difficult it will naturally be to make and bugfix. But I'm convinced this is the way it should be; one item to really stand out from the rest, to really make people consider what to spend their store credits on, instead of just a funny haha one-and-done kind of deal.

And I learned that the best way of going through with this is just... going through with it. I often doubt if something will be a good idea and whether I'll be able to make it or not, and I had that a lot with the Glove. And it was tempting to just say "I don't want to do it" or "let's just find an excuse to explain to the player why they can't do it" (and quite frankly, there is merit in finding peace with these options, as following the things that felt right lead to a lot of extra time and stress spent on this one item), but then I decided to just try. To just make the item and see if it worked. And you know what; it just got better every time I actually made it.

The interactions with doors were the most recent example, and I think they make for an excellent secret feature to elevate the Glove's uses, but the picking up and launching of other players was the most daring step, as this would naturally mess with the game's systems like collision and that player's rotation a LOT (which is part of the reason why it's so expensive: if you can't buy it, you can't find bugs with it lol). And, you know, it did mess with everything, and I'm still ironing out kinks and am going to playtest this thing a lot more extensively, but it's an idea that I believe fits the game's hilarity so well, and something that I believe will make the item stand out so much more. And if it stands out because it's buggy, then maybe that's not too bad either, as we can all laugh and talk about it, and have fun with it in the capability in which it does work.

So if you're reading this and want to get into modding and making games too, then my advice is to just sit down and do it. Don't keep thinking about how cool your ideas are and hide behind excuses like I did for too long, but actually invest into making it happen. I think both DougDoug and Masahiro Sakurai also gave this advice in some of their videos, which is probably where I got my mentality from, and I fully agree with them that you can't make things happen by dreaming, only by doing. ...And in case you're reading this and already are into modding and making games then hi please don't burn me to the ground I'm trying to learn ;-;.

But yeah, I'm starting to ramble again. The Golden Glove is going very well, it's still got a lot of progress left ahead of it, but v2 has finally turned from a dot on the horizon to a distant shore, now all I have to do is sail there.

2024-11-17:

Hi there, been a while.

The week after the last dev log, I had my final exams, so I really wanted to focus on that. And luckily, I passed, in large part thanks to all the things I learned from this massive update, which is a real :) moment. Okay now for the serious stuff: the Golden Glove.

Oh my god has the Glove taken me on a journey (don't take that out of context). The past two weeks were spent on nothing but work on the Glove. Finishing it, testing it, adding a thing, finishing it again, adding new sounds, finishing it again, playtesting it, bugfixing it, finishing it for the fourth time, adding a thing, testing it, finishing it, testing it, probably finishing it for real now I hope. Needless to say a LOT of work on the glove has taken place, and I wouldn't have had it any other way, as I think this item is now by far the best thing I have made yet. It could have easily been its own mod, but the fact that it coexists with a ton of other features that I'm proud of is just so, so gratifying. Also I quickly made 4 [REDACTED] which I hope you enjoy.

Now, to stop myself from rambling and tell you something useful, I'd like to share what it is that made the Glove such a succes:

1. The combination of usefulness versus silliness. I've been able to find plenty of things for the glove to help out with. Ranged attacks, stunning, etcetera etcetera, and maybe people will disagree and think it's useless. But when we first playtested it, we didn't even go to any levels. We were with 5 people, and they were just playing around with the glove at the Company building for like 10 minutes, having fun. And they were having genuine reactions, laughing out loud, experimenting with what all it can do. I think just for that alone, the silliness made up for the possibly questionable uses of the glove.

2. Responsiveness. The glove reacts to the world and the world reacts to the glove. In my head, the glove was meant to be a serious option for people to want to purchase, but it wouldn't be much of an option if they thought it only had one single use such as picking up items from a distance. It's for that reason that I kept going back and adding things, to add special interactions for the glove to collide with. I won't list them here, otherwise I'll keep rambling, and also deprive you of your own experimenting with the item. But the fact that the glove can just... do things. That it's noticeable what it does as soon as you press the mouse button and as soon that glove slams into something. I think that's what elevated this item to a success. Like I said last time, I didn't want it to be a one-and-done-deal, and it easily could have been if I made it a cheap item-picker-upper, but the fact that it's expensive and useful to almost anything you can think of, is what (hopefully) makes people want the glove.

3. Dedication. I don't believe this item would have been as fun (and as freakin' bugfixed holy sh-) if I had taken it easy and just spent an hour or two on it every day over the course of months (or... maybe it would have... uhhh, I just want to get this update out the door already... haha...). Now I've had the focus and mindset to test the glove with everything and on everything, so I now really truly believe I have all my bases covered. And as I said last time, the best things happened just by "doing it", just making it regardless of what rational thoughts might stop you. I really believe the time spent on this item will be noticeable.

Anyway, I lost my train of thought, sorry for the long blurb of text again. With the Golden Glove fully finished, LCGoldScrapMod has hit v1.9.7, so the distant shore on the horizon now turned into a harbor I can start preparing to dock at (if that metaphor makes any sense). Next up: placeholder models and registering all config sound effects. No new features anymore, just punching numbers and creating assets. Hope things are a bit smoother sailing from now on.

2024-12-02:

This will be the second-to-last DevDiary I'll be writing for GoldScrap. One, because there's only really two things I would like to reflect on. And two, because I... clearly can't keep up the consistency do justify pretending to know what I'm talking about :/

So, first of all, today the very last things that needed to "get done" were finished. This included revamping all the v1 Silly Scrap models, so that their origin points would overlap that of the vanilla game's models, and I could thus get rid of, like, a hundred redundant lines setting all their vertical offsets, and rotation offsets, and blablabla that could cause desyncs between people too.

I also put the finishing touches on a ton of the features, like adding a jingle to the Gold Nodes once you've exhausted every single one in a level, or how the Golden Glove now uses its "more damage up close"-gimmick on one more hazard, further emphasizing this gimmick so people hopefully catch onto it when using it in combat, its main intended purpose. Stuff that's just proper audiovisual feedback / game design-ey things, I think.

Also, I spent a bit of time creating icons, and I spent like freaking three hours reading all the Directory-LOG dialogue again to stamp out typos and rewrite the final things I wanted to add or was unhappy with. That was a chore.

And a few days ago I reworked the Gold Nuggets into a system that gives me much more flexibility in manipulating the RNG, which I am much much happier with. I'm pretty excited seeing how the new system turns out, because in theory, it's basically just the same system with very minor under-the-hood tweaks. But I also hooked up another reference to Gold Fevers, so the Cat o' Gold has slowly become one of my low-key favorite unlockables of the mod, and I am so glad I decided to add the extras, like weather, it really makes this little mod something I am proud of.

But I hope the above things show something else I strongly believe in: there's a time to have fun and dick around and make new things, and there's a time to focus and knuckle down and finish things. Maybe this sounds like preaching to the choir, but I was talking to one of my friends who's also a producer in game design, and she said that wayyy too many people at our college apparently just... don't get that. But it's super important to just know when to tie a ribbon around something, call it done, and get it out into the world, instead of just sitting on it forever because "oh it's my hobby project and I love it so much".

I realize this is turning into some sort of self-praising now, but what I'm trying to say, is that GoldScrap v2 is something I wholeheartedly stand behind (including its long development time) because I neither rushed things nor got lazy. I could have made the 20 new scrap items and called it a day back in August. But then we wouldn't now have the pickaxe and gold nodes, we wouldn't have gotten Gold Fevers, and I wouldn't have found an excuse to make the Golden Glove. And I also could have finished the Glove, the whatevers, everything, and then said "yeah sure I'll put it online like this because it works when I play with my friends", while from v1 I learned that I have to take the proper precautions, test VERY thoroughly, and create backups in case something breaks or people play with mods that replace assets. So that's what I'm doing: I didn't make v2 just a formality with some more scrap, I tried to have legitimate fun in making all-new content for people to enjoy, and then I tried to facilitate for everyone by applying focus and testing every nook and cranny I can think of. Of course for modding nobody... really cares, and I take this too seriously. But I really want v2 to be something I have enjoyed to make and I hope you will enjoy to play. So that's why I'm taking this very seriously.

Now, to wrap things up... The mod's basically at v1.9.9. I want to check some more errors I can think of, before I really give it that label. But comparing it harbors (or something?), the boat's sliding into place and I can finally talk to the people on shore- this metaphor sucks. I'm almost done. Just three small bullet points left to go.

2024-12-09:

And that's that.

After 12 straight hours of drawing, I finished the Art Of Gold and finally labeled the mod as v2.0.0, and it is wild to me that this 5-months long journey is finally coming to an end. And it's wild to look back on this DevDiary and see that I wrote the first one over 2 months ago. Just goes to show how long the gold store items took to make...

But, for this final devlog (if you could really call it that), I wanted to reflect on why I did all this, and why I didn't really do this for myself:

1. I do really sincerely hope people who play with my mod, which hopefully includes you reading this, have fun with the update. Modding finally filled a hole I was really struggling with in my life, as my game development college just... didn't really teach us how to make games, at all, but just how to sit in meetings all day and talk about making games. The only reason I'm even here doing this is because the stars just aligned back in January when I decided to start modding. Lethal Company was popular, modding it seemed to be easy, I worked a tiny little bit in Unity so far, and a streamer I've been following for years once streamed themselves having modded their avatar character into a game, so me finally picking up modding was simply coincidence. And GoldScrap also coincidentally happened to fulfill the role of "the popular one" that I felt confident showing off my skills in. Things like LegDay, PaperCompany, and the SoundRandomizer are mods close to my heart too, but a mod turning items into gold being such a generically appealing idea made it easier to see my hard work paying off. And I realize maybe you only care about the scrap and not about the store items at all, and that's fine. I try to make it so nothing really changes as long as you don't interact with the gold store, but I hope some of the things you see in the store at least show off my love for making game features like the Golden Glove and the Pickaxe and its mining feature. I learned so much about making games from these features, and I hope to keep growing to make more independent features in the future.

2. And I hope these devlogs, if anything, show you that you can do this too. I don't know who'll read these and if you're already much more knowledgeable than I am, but I am aiming this point to people like the me of one year ago: who only think about making games and don't feel confident in their abilities. And I say, just do it! Not like the meme, I'm being serious. Hands-on experience is so, SO valuable. Just take an idea you like and just make it. You'll probably fail once or twice (believe me GoldScrap's v1 code is a mess), but as long as you don't throw in the towel you'll grow over it and make something better in the future. You just will. There's, like, literally no way you'll become worse over time. Every Gold Store feature started off with me going like "there's no way, this is not possible", and some items indeed were really freaking difficult to make (for example, the Golden Ticket is a complete circus of code just because the base game sets one integer back to -1 literally ONE line too soon). But here we are, with everything from the Hourglass, to the Ticket, to the Pickaxe, to the Safe Box, to the Goldfather Clock, to the Jack-In-the-Gold, to the shining star the Golden Glove, everything landed on its feet because I refused to give up and see things through to give you all something to have fun with. So, to you, to me from a year ago, to anyone who doubts themselves: You got this!

So, as I said... That's that. GoldScrap v2 will release in just a few days, and I can't wait. As for me, I got the green light to make my next college project another Lethal Company mod, so I'm afraid you all aren't rid of me yet. I'm gonna try to involve myself a bit more in the community to make it, and its gonna be a mod that uses everything I learned from v2, so even I don't know precisely what's next. But no matter how impossible it seems, the impossible hasn't stopped me before.

I hope GoldScrap v2 brings a smile to your face, and thank you all for the incredibly fun year.
~ Simon