Hey guys,
I'm sorry there hasn't been more info to share over the last few weeks. Even though things have been quiet, I've still been very busy! I've been beta-testing, fixing glitches, adding features, etc, etc. It's tough to test a game with so many potential variations!
Right now I'm aiming for a release date of July 5th, but if I don't feel 100% confident that it's ready by then, I may go back to the original plan of August 8th. We'll see how things develop.
I've been adding a lot of voice acting, even though the majority of characters only say something if (when) they kill you. I'm happy to announce the return of Heather Masters, Amber Lee Connors, Michella Moss, Christopher McCullough, and Becky Shrimpton reprising their old roles or taking on new ones! The game will also be introducing a whole roster of new voice actors as well!
I've also decided that Ultimate Custom Night will be released as it's own game rather than an addition to Pizzeria Simulator. I thought this would just make things easier to update and manage, as well as just being easier to launch and play. I'm working on the Steam page for it and will hopefully get a "coming soon" page up in the coming weeks. It will still be a free release of course!
I'm also happy to finally give the answer to the MUCH asked question, "Will UCN really be customizable or will it just be presets?" The answer is that it IS completely customizable. Every single character can be set to a difficulty between 0-20. In addition to that, there is also a button on the sidebar to add +1 to all characters, as well as buttons that set all characters to 5, 10, and 20. So with all of those options, it should be pretty easy to completely customize the difficulties of every single character to whatever you want!
That also brings up the topic of what the goal of UCN will be. After all, in SL custom night, you would get a star for beating each preset, but in this there are no real presets. The answer is that you are working to achieve the highest score possible. That might sound dreadfully underwhelming at first, but it's actually a system that works really well here. Each difficulty point for any given character is worth 10, meaning that a max difficulty character is worth 200. So the total possible high-score will be 10,000, with all characters set to 20. (No points are given for characters you have no control over.) So the strategy here is picking the largest assortment of characters that you can manage, maxing out characters that are easy together, and leaving out characters that you feel make things too difficult, to achieve the highest score you can. The character select screen keeps record of your highest score, as well as your best time in 50/20 mode.
Also, I'm considering doing something that I've never done before, and that is holding a closed-beta testing run for select people. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle this yet. I may release it only to some youtubers, or I may just throw up a version on GameJolt with the HOPES that people will understand that it's an early version! But hopefully there is some sort of middle-option where I can give it to a group of people with hopes that it won't leak out too far, but that would be tough to do. Send me some comments with suggestions on how you think I should handle this.
I'll post more updates as I have them!
EDIT: I've corrected the difficulty to read 0-20. You CAN set characters to zero. I thought this would go without saying, but a lot of people were concerned that you wouldn't be able to set characters to zero. Also, for those upset about no stars or plushies usually given as rewards for presets, there WILL be little rewards for score benchmarks. And to those upset that the score caps at 10,000, I wouldn't worry about it. ;)