Here's an odd one to talk about, what even is this thing we have been calling "Party Mode"?
Honestly, its probably not what that name makes people think and I'm trying to think of a better term. Party Mode tends to imply multiplayer/group activity, and if there's any of that included in the mode it'd still only be a small part of it.
Sandbox Mode? Extras? Toybox? Basically it's just the place where we can put the "everything else" of the content. This is very much the "no promises" section on top of how much of the content already isn't guaranteed.
A first person mode? Put it in there.
Customizable challenge modes? Put them in there.
Some kind of multiplayer support? Put it in there.
Twitch/Streaming integration? Seems like a good place for it.
You can get a bit of a picture of what the intention was for it, just a sub-menu for different wacky stuff that comes to mind. Likely nothing tied to high scores or leaderboards, so easier to add and manage both the data and expectations for.
The main oddity for it at this point is entirely how long we feel like continuing to develop using the Unity engine, the recent issues really kicked our motivation to spend time practicing Unity-specific features like their networking options, so there may be some limits to how much extra stuff we feel like developing.
"When I try to rewrite old clunky code into the more formal more official way they want us to do it and it turns out more clunky than it was before, we have a problem" - Recent quote from Kyle during one of our development meetings. As time goes on our skills improve, but the development debt of how Unity itself seems to be built increasingly shows itself to us.
At some point we have to decide when it is more worth it to just move onto a new game.
We'll see how it goes, to an extent this might just be us spouting ideas far too early before there's a concrete idea of how they'll be realized. That's about as simple as the situation is.