Introduction
Welcome to one of the game's biggest updates yet, celebrating the project's 5th development birthday. This update has been primarily focused around YOUR feedback, thank you to those of you that have contributed by leaving constructive reviews.
As you may already know, I'm a single man development team so adding new features and improving the game takes a lot of time; especially considering I work full time too and the codebase for this game has grown to a ridiculous size and has become incredibly complicated to work on.
Biggest Changes
Even if you don't play the latest update, I'd really appreciate it if you took the time to take a look at some of the below changes I've been working on this week that are in this update.
New Gun
A new shotgun has been added to the game, making 4 different campaign weapons. One of the biggest issue I personally have with this game and I've seen others complain about is the lack of weapons. The only issue is, adding new weapons using the current codebase is incredibly time consuming.
There will be changes in the future to help add more weapons (and maybe even modifications) in the future.
New Items & Sanity System
This is one of the biggest new features, a whole new system injected straight into the game. There are designated safe zones that allow you to regenerate your sanity (typically near save stations). Additionally, there are also new items that can be used to increase your sanity and health that can be found throughout the campaign; but be careful as some items will cause more harm than good!
New Enemy
It's about time I added a new enemy, there were only 5 in the campaign originally but I'd like to boost the variety and add dynamic AI behaviour into the future. This is just the start, please note that the newly added enemy is still WIP and will have more unique AI in the future updates.
Map Layout Changes
Generally, there have been very few changes to the maps since release but this update lightly touches on some new areas and added complexity to some of the maps. This is still experimental and very much untested so expect bugs!
Improved Brightness System
For quite some time, the brightness system has been rather sub-par so I've refined it to now use in-engine exposure as opposed to an image overlay filter. You may need to reset your game preferences or adjust the settings file.
Improved Replayability
Some items that are key factors in the campaign now change their positions randomly to help increase variety and improve replayability. Please note that more items will have this feature added to them in the future.
Conclusion
As you can see, I've been rather busy! Please stick around and continue to watch this space as I plan on continuing to add new features and mechanics to the game as well as updating the multiplayer which has been neglected for quite some time now.
You can view the full change log and plans for future updates here:
https://renovatesoftware.com/deploy/shrieking-darkness/
