Well, well, well. What can I say? The wait, you’ll find it was definitely worth it. Today I have an absolutely monstrous update for the Samara lovers out there. Wet Nightmares beta version 4.01, this update is the full chapter 3 experience completely blocked out, and this is something you can experience right now on the brand new beta branch for Wet Nightmares! You can enable this via the game properties, it will download a whole new game and will ONLY be Chapter 3. It will not have any nice menus or support your old saves, but you can see everything from the start to the end of the chapter.
Why beta branch? Well simply because this build is a chapter blocking build. Blocking is when the majority of the game is using sketches and basic drawings to “block out” the timing and scene changes needed. It will also give Erkerut a laundry list of art he needs to complete if the blocking build is accepted without any changes.
Take a look at the example of what the blocking art will look like vs. the full complete art. The full Chapter 3 has 285 hand-drawn images with 92 of those images in a “final quality” state (though you won’t see those in the game currently). There is a lot of animations in there as well, new audio effects for Samara, new music tracks, and a boatload of spoops and scares.
Narrative-wise the chapter is completely done—as you’ll experience in the build if you play it—currently it only supports English for now, but the entire chapter is over 24,000 words long. That is the combined size of chapters 1 and 2! Meaning with the addition of chapter 3, we have now doubled the length of the game. There are some spelling, grammar, and formatting issues that need to be addressed as well, but know that we already know about them.
So please, enjoy this look into the development of chapter 3. If you do muster up the courage to play it, which would effectively spoil the chapter for yourself, you’ll have an excellent idea why it has taken us so long to get it all together.
The next steps for the game will be that the programming team will integrate the blocking into the main game, and Erkerut will move onto the task of doing each of the 300ish hand-drawn art panels for the game.
Looking forward to all the new feedback!