Introduction:
Hello everyone! I hope you all had an amazing holiday and a happy new year! The devs here at Sleepy Dog Studios have been cooking up something better than Christmas cookies; a new update to The Obsessive Shadow!
We hope that you enjoy all the new content. Before we dive into the changes, we wanted to share some exciting news! The Oculus Quest version is available on SideQuest as of now and we encourage you to try it out if you own an Oculus Quest.
Along with the SideQuest version of the game, we are going to be releasing the Quest AppLab version in the coming days on the official Oculus store! This is some exciting news, and we will keep you posted as these builds come out!
Anyways, let's get to the changes!
Changelog:
New AI System
We felt like the old system for how the stalker spawned was inconsistent and left players wondering why they died. We cleaned up this system and now the stalker is way more consistent. There can never be multiple stalkers and you will only ever have to focus on one task at a time.
Stalker Visual Changes
Thanks to Lane, (our 3D artist and animator), the stalker looks a lot scarier than he did before. He also worked hard on creating some fresh new animations. We hope that these changes will really spook you if we ever were to add a jumpscare to the game... *wink* *wink*
We also felt like it wasn't clear when you successfully flashed the stalker away. Lane created a new animation that plays when you successfully flash him away. There is also a sound that plays so this should hopefully give you guys more feedback as to the stalker's current state.
The Flashlight
Similar to the AI system, we reworked the flashlight system as we didn't feel like it was working the way we intended it to. We made the flashlight dim faster and made the shake a lot more consistent. Remember, you can only flash away the stalker if you have your flashlight charged.
General Visual Changes
We fixed up some lighting to make the game look a bit better. We got rid of the blue tint that you saw in the game as we didn't feel like it fit the feel we were going for.
We made the TV screens have a glow to them. Obviously, TV screens are not matte and will glow even when the lights are out in the room. This change will make the TVs look a lot more natural!
Ambience
We worked hard to make the game world feel better! One of the ways we did this was by adding some creepy noises that play when you are roaming the house. Keep an eye out for some other strange occurrences the stalker might be causing.
Other General Changes
We decided to remove the PC (turning on and off) and the hand under the bed as we felt like, for the demo's purposes, it cluttered the gameplay cycle and made things confusing. Please know that when the non-demo builds are out, these features will be reworked and in there along with plenty more content to come!
We made some fun changes to the menu so keep an eye out and see if you can spot them!
Optimization
We made a bunch of changes on the internal side of the game that we can't go into depth about, However, know that your game should run a lot smoother due to all of this!
Conclusion:
If you are reading this, thank you so much for reading all the way through to the end! We really appreciate all of your support and hope to bring you amazing content in the future. Thank you so much for over 2,600 downloads on the demo so far! We really, really appreciate the ongoing support!
If you find any bugs, have suggestions or want to give us any bit of feedback, we would love to hear it! Please reach out to @SleepyDogDevs on Twitter.
If you are curious about the time frame of when the full game will be available for release, we expect to release it sometime in Q3-Q4 of 2023. However, on our everlasting mission to bring you all content, we are going to release the game in early access when we feel like there is enough content to warrant an early access build. We will then release updates to early access until we feel like the game is ready to be fully released.
Make sure to wishlist the game so that you can stay posted on new updates! 2023 is going to be there year of The Obsessive Shadow!
Thank you all for your support from the Sleepy Dog Studios Team!
- Pablo, Lane, Dylan, and Mojoe