I wish Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! It has been quite a while since the last update and it is time to change it. We watched all the video about games, that we managed to find, analyzed them and searched for bugs. Most of those bugs have been fixed. One of the remaining small problems is the periodical flicker of objects. However, we included a lot of interesting, new things! Most of those, of course, is just visual, they also play a certain role. Lets begin…
- Now the game visually tells us, when it is saved.
- Minor Balance changes in maniac state.
- Menu soundtrack and intro were changed to Christmas ones.
- A lot of major errors corrections.
- Certain in-game information was changed (WARNING! The main directory was changed, so old saves and settings would not be found!)
- New, good ending (As a prize to those, who don’t kill anyone).
- Sanity (for example, death from fear) concept has been improved
Lets explain more about this concept:
Idea for it was created just after the TGA2017, when Hideo Kojima presented third trailer of the Death Stranding. The discussions caused by his game in our team were much hotter than even those about our own game. When the details were still unknown, many players guessed, that the underwater world, where the Reedus’ character appeared is the afterlife one. It's funny, but later it turned out right. We had an idea «What if we also try to develop some other mechanic of death?». We discussed about our new game concept for a very long time. We needed to decrease the amount of Game Overs when the player failed. As a result, we took death concept from the Prey(2006) and started to experiment with it. So...
Everytime Ada «dies» from fear, she would appear in a little location - her personal hell. It will have a big heart stricken with Darkness with a new runes (personality shards) scattered through the level. If you bring those shards to heart - they will heal it. Player can go back to life anytime, you just need to approach the heart and press button, banishing the darkness from within. Upon the return player would get as much sanity points as the amount of shards that player brought to heart.
This concept is currently on testing stage. Many features have not been added and are not finalized yet. However, we don’t have much time anymore and our Christmas gift can’t be delayed. In our opinion, we did well. Game balance was changed significantly though it still needs further development. We will continue working on fixing bugs found by the community.
Overall, update is quite big and we are satisfied with the result despite not achieving most of the previous goals. Nevertheless, it is not important now as the everything is much better than before, so I wish you a pleasant game and searching for bugs. At the end, I want to congratulate all of you again with coming holidays.