"Try to Fall Asleep" Community Transmission #2 - September 2020
Good evening players,
Today we're bringing a new Community Transmission (CT) for September of 2020. This time we decided to do a news post on Steam rather than doing a full video simply because as much as we’d like to make a proper video for the CT, we really want to prioritize all of our efforts on developing the 4th night. We’ll still follow the format of the CT, but in a text format. But don’t worry - we still have gifs and we’ll give answers to your questions!
So without afutherado, let’s dive in the CT #2...
I’d like to start with addressing what’s been going on with the development of the game. We assume that the biggest question after the first CT is - you mentioned a release for night 4 in late July, but it’s September now… What gives? In all honesty, we had too high hopes and I was a bit too optimistic about the release of night 4, so we’re sorry for mentioning that date. But on top of that, we were put in some unfortunate circumstances as well. I don’t want to get into too many details with this, but basically there was a huge issue with our income from Steam. Since we didn’t get any income since May, we weren’t able to commission people for work and even worse, we struggled to pay people for the work that had been done. And because of that, most of my team had to take a slight hiatus from the development. The issue wasn’t anything special, bad or illegal - it was just a small detail that needed to be changed, but in order to do that we had to go through a lot of bureaucracy. But as of late August, everything has been resolved, people have been paid, we can commission people again and everything is more or less back to normal.
As far as the development progress on night 4 goes, I’m happy to report that we’ve achieved the minimum viable product, where the core mechanics and gameplay have been made and you can complete night 4 from start to finish. That said, there still are plenty of things that we need to add, such as a few cutscenes, interactables, some spooks, lore pieces and of course, we still need to polish and playtest the whole thing.
There are times where we’re working on night 4 and we realise that there are things that could be further improved or things that we should add. For example, to tell the backstory about the RL-95 underground facility, originally we had a very simple, traditional approach, where there would be notes/pages spread across the level that the player would pick up and read their contents. We realised that just reading the notes was kinda boring, so we decided to hire a voice actor who would read out the notes and even add a visual element that reflects what’s being read from the notes. This’ll do justice to the backstory that was written for the underground facility, as it is a story that I really enjoyed writing and am quite proud of. But, things like these will considerably increase the development time.
Night 4 is one of our biggest nights in the game and it’s also a big turning point in the story as well. Our goal is to deliver an awesome update with night 4, but in order to do that, we need just a bit more time. However, I don’t feel comfortable putting an estimate on the release, because the last time we did that, we encountered the aforementioned delays and it put a lot of unnecessary pressure on us. Rest assured that everything is going well and night 4 really isn’t that far away. :))
It wouldn’t be a proper CT if we didn’t bring any sneak peaks of night 4, right? So here are a few gifs of some familiar and brand new locations!
A cinematic at the start of the 4th dream. Where could it possibly be…
Here’s a shot of the improved cave. With some game optimization techniques we were able to make it
look better and add more detail to it as well.
A brand new location in the underground facility.
This part of the CT is dedicated to answering questions from the community.
Q: What's probably the most time consuming aspect of development? Is it creating models or animations or events or bug fixing or..? (@GoodBoyKaru from Twitter)
A: It always warrys… I don’t think I can narrow it down to just one thing, but I’d say programming, bug fixing and game mechanic creation can take most of our time and they can also be very unpredictable. With bug fixing, it sometimes can get very challenging to find the cause of the bug and once you fix it, you need to make sure you don’t break anything else.
Q: Where did the idea for the game come from? (@!bigchonky from Discord)
A: It came from personal experience. Ironically, I was never a huge fan of horror movies or games. I used to be one of those people who got easily scared. I vividly remember seeing Paranormal Activity for the first time, and to say the least, that movie messed up a whole summer for me. For many nights, I had trouble falling asleep. It always felt that I was never alone in my room - that someone was standing somewhere in the corner, staring at me, waiting for the right moment to do some kind of harm. There was always a feeling that something weird was about to happen and I was super sensitive to any noise - creaking doors, cat steps, wind noise. Somehow falling asleep, becoming unconscious and leaving myself vulnerable to some kind of an unknown entity felt really scary to me. Fast forward to late 2014 and Five nights at Freddy's games were coming out. I played the first one and yet again, I felt terrified, but this time I was more mature and it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was with Paranormal Activity. FNAF brought a brand new concept to the horror game genre where the player was stationary - you couldn't move from your seat, but you still had to somehow deal with the terrifying animatronics. That sense of powerlessness, struggle being glued to one spot kinda resonated with me, and eventually it clicked in my head one day that falling asleep and struggling with your paranoia was equally if not even more terrifying. And then it naturally progressed from that genesis. Eventually, I even grew to love horror, both movies and games!
Q: Do you consider any other horror game to be an inspiration, like FNAF or Bendy and the ink machine? (@DOUBLEW from Discord)
A: Yes, however, I only got into horror games in my late teens. FNAF of course was one of the biggest inspirations, along with Slenderman, Resident Evil VII, P.T. and the Silent Hill franchise and some of the .EXE games. Besides video games, a lot of inspiration for horror came from movies such as The Shining, The Thing, Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring and The Blair Witch Project. Also, while talking about inspirations, I recently read Junji Ito’s UZUMAKI, which also left an impact on me!
Q: Have you guys ever had to scrap an idea/night because it didn't turn out as planned? (@RK-900 from Discord)
A: In the first 3 nights we never really encountered anything like that. For the 4th we had to dial down what we wanted to do with the dream phase a little, because it got a bit too complex. Nonetheless, it's more of a positive than a negative for the 4th dream phase.
Q: Were there any strategies with optimizing the large levels such as the forest? (@PythonViper14 from Discord)
A: Yes, considering the average specs of a gaming PC, optimizing is still very crucial for a good game. We’re not flawless at it, but over time we’ve gained some experience with it. I think there are 3 key factors for optimization - lighting, meshes with materials and scripts. Each of them require its own approach and optimizing techniques. With lighting, you need to consider what lights can be baked and where you need to see shadows. With meshes you want to reduce the amount of polygons as much as possible, while maintaining the graphical fidelity and optimise materials with mipmaps. And with scripts you need to make sure you’re not making any infinite loops or unnecessarily checking/changing a single or multiple values for every frame. It might warry from engine to engine and some projects might be different from others, but the same logic should apply to everything.
And that’s the end of this CT! Thank you very much for reading it through. Night 4 is coming and I can't wait for you all to finally experience it :))
Good night,
Martin
Today we're bringing a new Community Transmission (CT) for September of 2020. This time we decided to do a news post on Steam rather than doing a full video simply because as much as we’d like to make a proper video for the CT, we really want to prioritize all of our efforts on developing the 4th night. We’ll still follow the format of the CT, but in a text format. But don’t worry - we still have gifs and we’ll give answers to your questions!
So without afutherado, let’s dive in the CT #2...
Where’s night 4?
I’d like to start with addressing what’s been going on with the development of the game. We assume that the biggest question after the first CT is - you mentioned a release for night 4 in late July, but it’s September now… What gives? In all honesty, we had too high hopes and I was a bit too optimistic about the release of night 4, so we’re sorry for mentioning that date. But on top of that, we were put in some unfortunate circumstances as well. I don’t want to get into too many details with this, but basically there was a huge issue with our income from Steam. Since we didn’t get any income since May, we weren’t able to commission people for work and even worse, we struggled to pay people for the work that had been done. And because of that, most of my team had to take a slight hiatus from the development. The issue wasn’t anything special, bad or illegal - it was just a small detail that needed to be changed, but in order to do that we had to go through a lot of bureaucracy. But as of late August, everything has been resolved, people have been paid, we can commission people again and everything is more or less back to normal.
What’s the progress on night 4?
As far as the development progress on night 4 goes, I’m happy to report that we’ve achieved the minimum viable product, where the core mechanics and gameplay have been made and you can complete night 4 from start to finish. That said, there still are plenty of things that we need to add, such as a few cutscenes, interactables, some spooks, lore pieces and of course, we still need to polish and playtest the whole thing.
There are times where we’re working on night 4 and we realise that there are things that could be further improved or things that we should add. For example, to tell the backstory about the RL-95 underground facility, originally we had a very simple, traditional approach, where there would be notes/pages spread across the level that the player would pick up and read their contents. We realised that just reading the notes was kinda boring, so we decided to hire a voice actor who would read out the notes and even add a visual element that reflects what’s being read from the notes. This’ll do justice to the backstory that was written for the underground facility, as it is a story that I really enjoyed writing and am quite proud of. But, things like these will considerably increase the development time.
Night 4 is one of our biggest nights in the game and it’s also a big turning point in the story as well. Our goal is to deliver an awesome update with night 4, but in order to do that, we need just a bit more time. However, I don’t feel comfortable putting an estimate on the release, because the last time we did that, we encountered the aforementioned delays and it put a lot of unnecessary pressure on us. Rest assured that everything is going well and night 4 really isn’t that far away. :))
Night 4 Sneak peaks
It wouldn’t be a proper CT if we didn’t bring any sneak peaks of night 4, right? So here are a few gifs of some familiar and brand new locations!
A cinematic at the start of the 4th dream. Where could it possibly be…
Here’s a shot of the improved cave. With some game optimization techniques we were able to make it
look better and add more detail to it as well.
A brand new location in the underground facility.
Q&A
This part of the CT is dedicated to answering questions from the community.
Q: What's probably the most time consuming aspect of development? Is it creating models or animations or events or bug fixing or..? (@GoodBoyKaru from Twitter)
A: It always warrys… I don’t think I can narrow it down to just one thing, but I’d say programming, bug fixing and game mechanic creation can take most of our time and they can also be very unpredictable. With bug fixing, it sometimes can get very challenging to find the cause of the bug and once you fix it, you need to make sure you don’t break anything else.
Q: Where did the idea for the game come from? (@!bigchonky from Discord)
A: It came from personal experience. Ironically, I was never a huge fan of horror movies or games. I used to be one of those people who got easily scared. I vividly remember seeing Paranormal Activity for the first time, and to say the least, that movie messed up a whole summer for me. For many nights, I had trouble falling asleep. It always felt that I was never alone in my room - that someone was standing somewhere in the corner, staring at me, waiting for the right moment to do some kind of harm. There was always a feeling that something weird was about to happen and I was super sensitive to any noise - creaking doors, cat steps, wind noise. Somehow falling asleep, becoming unconscious and leaving myself vulnerable to some kind of an unknown entity felt really scary to me. Fast forward to late 2014 and Five nights at Freddy's games were coming out. I played the first one and yet again, I felt terrified, but this time I was more mature and it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was with Paranormal Activity. FNAF brought a brand new concept to the horror game genre where the player was stationary - you couldn't move from your seat, but you still had to somehow deal with the terrifying animatronics. That sense of powerlessness, struggle being glued to one spot kinda resonated with me, and eventually it clicked in my head one day that falling asleep and struggling with your paranoia was equally if not even more terrifying. And then it naturally progressed from that genesis. Eventually, I even grew to love horror, both movies and games!
Q: Do you consider any other horror game to be an inspiration, like FNAF or Bendy and the ink machine? (@DOUBLEW from Discord)
A: Yes, however, I only got into horror games in my late teens. FNAF of course was one of the biggest inspirations, along with Slenderman, Resident Evil VII, P.T. and the Silent Hill franchise and some of the .EXE games. Besides video games, a lot of inspiration for horror came from movies such as The Shining, The Thing, Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring and The Blair Witch Project. Also, while talking about inspirations, I recently read Junji Ito’s UZUMAKI, which also left an impact on me!
Q: Have you guys ever had to scrap an idea/night because it didn't turn out as planned? (@RK-900 from Discord)
A: In the first 3 nights we never really encountered anything like that. For the 4th we had to dial down what we wanted to do with the dream phase a little, because it got a bit too complex. Nonetheless, it's more of a positive than a negative for the 4th dream phase.
Q: Were there any strategies with optimizing the large levels such as the forest? (@PythonViper14 from Discord)
A: Yes, considering the average specs of a gaming PC, optimizing is still very crucial for a good game. We’re not flawless at it, but over time we’ve gained some experience with it. I think there are 3 key factors for optimization - lighting, meshes with materials and scripts. Each of them require its own approach and optimizing techniques. With lighting, you need to consider what lights can be baked and where you need to see shadows. With meshes you want to reduce the amount of polygons as much as possible, while maintaining the graphical fidelity and optimise materials with mipmaps. And with scripts you need to make sure you’re not making any infinite loops or unnecessarily checking/changing a single or multiple values for every frame. It might warry from engine to engine and some projects might be different from others, but the same logic should apply to everything.
And that’s the end of this CT! Thank you very much for reading it through. Night 4 is coming and I can't wait for you all to finally experience it :))
Good night,
Martin