It's been a while! Now that the Halloween season is over, the game has had a small boost in players in the last week. This has given me an opportunity to get more feedback, and today's update mostly revolves around the game's tutorial. There are also a few game play and UI tweaks in this update too.
Tutorial Tweaks
- You can no longer die during the tutorial. Instead, a pop-up info box will let you know that you would have experienced death, and immediately begin to lower your heart rate back down.
- Tutorial triggers are now floating bubbles that can be interacted with instead of walking through to trigger, allowing the player to freely walk through the map without their view being disrupted by accidentally walking through a tutorial trigger.
- Adjusted the boundaries of the map so that you can exit the back yard through the gate closest to the driveway, allowing you to walk around the side of the garage.
- There are now less items on the tutorial map, making it a little easier to find the ghost item.
- Minor performance optimizations to the map.
Gameplay Tweaks
- When the ghost reaches a certain power level, all items that anger the ghost (including items that are NOT the ghost item) will begin to emit a low humming noise to help locate the general area of the item.
- When the ghost reaches max power level, the ghost item will begin to glow red, indicating the exact item.
- Disabled camera viewing through the tablet. This may or may not be temporary; the change is an attempt to improve performance of the game, reducing the amount of scene renderers. The cameras will still ping information to the tablet, which is their primary function.
- Increased sprint duration to 10 seconds.
UI Tweaks
- Removed all camera operation keybinds while camera functionality is disabled.
- Removed the option to play each house individually. This may return, but I'd like to focus on refining the game on the map with proper sizing. The pace of the game is designed to complement larger map size.
- Readjusted the mouse sensitivity slider to try and accommodate a better range of sensitivities.
I'm hopeful that from now until the end of the year, I can work on optimizing multiplayer. As of now, it's mostly unplayable and riddled with bugs and network problems. I appreciate all the new players that gave my game a test run, including suffering through the multiplayer to give me insight on some previously unknown issues!