Try To Fall Asleep News

Night 4 has been finally added to "Try to Fall Asleep" Early Access! Post night 4 launch news article will be coming from us later on Steam.

Thank you everyone for your patience and the long wait. We hope you'll enjoy night 4 as much as we enjoyed making it :))

Goodnight,
the Amberdrop dev team

Good evening,

After months of waiting and many unexpected delays, we’re finally ready to announce the release date for the 4th night of “Try to Fall Asleep”.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It has been a long wait for sure, and for us to finally announce a solid release date for Night 4 - it feels unreal, but at the same time it’s absolutely amazing. Right now, we’re finalizing the main components of the 4th night and doing the last few adjustments and polishes before the release.

Night 4 is gonna be an amazing ride, and we hope that you’ll all enjoy it when it goes live this Saturday!



Goodnight,
Martin

Good evening players,

It's been a while since we did a community transmission on the game’s development progress, so it’s finally time to fix that!
Being our first post this year, we hope that everyone has had a decent start of the new year and we wish that it’ll only start to get better from here on out.

So, how have we been doing? What have we been up to? WHAT’S UP WITH NIGHT 4?? We’ll try to get you all up to date with the development of night 4 as much as possible and show some really cool stuff as well.

[h2]How are we doing?[/h2]

Apart from one complication, which we’ll get back to later in the post, we’ve been getting along pretty nicely. Like we said previously, December and January were quite tough because some of us were doing uni exams and final assignments. Our 3D artist, Will, who caught the Corona virus has fully recovered and is feeling better than ever. In february, we’ve been able to focus way more on the game and do a lot of great work for the game, adding more things and polishing the overall gameplay. So overall, we’re all ok and for the most part development is going smoothly :))



We know that you’ve been waiting for this update for a while now, and adding more time to that wait is really hard for us as well. Game development is hard, and for this to be a first game for a small team like ours is no easy task and sometimes things happen which are out of our hands. While making this game, we’re also learning, growing and getting better as game developers as well. We’ve already learned so much and gained some skill at it, but there’s always still some room for improvement. Let’s take the opportunity to share some insights...

[h2]Development progress of Night 4[/h2]

Currently, most of the main game stuff has been implemented. Taking everything into consideration, excluding one element of night 4, we estimate that the Night 4 Update is around 95% done. All we need to do in terms of pure gameplay is to simply playtest, debug, polish and adjust a few values. If it wasn’t for that one element of night 4, theoretically we could release it within 1-2 weeks.

[h2]That one thing about Night 4...[/h2]

With each new night, we try to raise the bar ever so slightly higher, so we can try new things, challenge ourselves, gain new knowledge and in the result release better and better content, and become better developers as well.
This time with night 4, one of our biggest ambitions yet was to try doing full human body and facial animations. We were fully ready to tackle this challenge, but unfortunately we were influenced by forces that were out of our control, such as our 3D artist getting Covid-19 and getting occupied with university. And in the result, this later turned out to be the biggest cause for night 4 delays.
At first, we tried to do it ourselves, but after trying to self-teach advanced Blender rigging and animations, we realised that we couldn’t do it ourselves without any additional help. Luckily, after a week long search for animators, we’ve found a wonderful animator, who’ll be joining our team and helping us out to make some great animations.

Now, there’s always been debates surrounding cutscenes in games and the whole “Games are not movies" agenda. To some extent, we agree - a game is a game first, and the rest comes along. So, maybe it might seem weird for our small team to delay the game and put so much work into this part of night 4. I don’t want to delve on this too much, but I’ll try to share our simple point of view.

Basically, we planned this to be the last part of night 4 that we work on. Everything else - gameplay, story, levels, main features etc. were worked on first. So, this part of the game never stole any time and resources from any other parts/elements of night 4. In fact, due to the delays, it actually gave us some extra time to work on other smaller things.

Now that the game is at its midpoint, and we’re familiar with the game’s setting and world, we can also start to dive deeper into the story and lore. And what better way to do it than with a direct confrontation between characters! It’s also a very special scene that is quite pivotal, and will set the tone for the last 3 nights. That’s why it’s so important to us, and well, it's gonna be pretty cool :))





Earlier today we premiered a brand new footage of some gameplay from Night 4. In it, you can see some key game mechanics as well as some of the new locations in the underground.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And that’s it for now! Thank you once again for sharing your support and enthusiasm about what we make. It really means a lot to us, and we can’t wait to finally release Night 4 into the world.
More news and info will come later this down the road ;))

Goodnight,
~Martin

Good evening players! Martin here,

Wanted to start off this post by saying thanks to everyone who were incredibly supportive in the previous Steam post. It’s pretty heartwarming to have such cool fans. You’re all amazing
Before we finally let go of this horrific year, we wanted to do one last Q&A. So, without further ado, let’s end 2020 on a high note and dive into your questions!

Are there any secrets in any of the nights?
Yes, there are quite a few. Some are more straightforward, and some are more well hidden and a bit more meta. Of course, when night 4 comes out, there will be even more. On night 4, you’ll get to discover one of the biggest secrets of the Pinetree island and unravel the mystery surrounding it. It’s gonna be great and our team can’t wait for you all to experience it for the first time!

Are you guys planning on having multiple endings?
We see the appeal of multiple endings, but when it comes to our game, it’s not a concept that works with our game. We want to tell a story that fits in our game’s overall canon. Having multiple endings, kinda makes it difficult to do something beyond the current game...

You have some interesting videos posted on the AmberDrop youtube channel, (i.e This is Revivel). Anything hidden in them? OFFICIAL STATEMENT: The Revivel company is aware of the tempered advertisement material. The reason why these videos have been distorted/tampered with is yet unknown. Revivel will do everything necessary to stop the spread of these videos as they are damaging to the company’s reputation and PR.

Will you upload more trailers, or will it come the night 4 first?
I think we could do one more short trailer for the launch of night 4. That would be pretty cool, right?

Have you guys thought about making Try to Fall Asleep a VR game also?
Yes. It has been one of the most asked questions and we know it’s something that people would really like to see. However, we don’t want to make just a straightup VR port of the game. There are reasons why VR is so appealing. It’s not just because of the visuals, but it also has to do with game mechanics that are specific and exclusive to VR. I think we would end up with a lot better VR experience if we made it from ground up to be meant for VR. Although we’re thinking about it, please don’t mistake this as a conformation for anything. If we’ll ever decide to do something in VR we’ll let you know, but our main focus is currently on the main game.

Will there be more game modes like "easy, medium, hard" and maybe an endless night where you see how long you can last for the part where you try to sleep?
A custom night is something that we’re definitely interested in. As to when we should add it, we’re not sure yet… We’d like to add it when the game transitions into a full release (1.0), so we can include all the customization options from all 6 nights. But, we’ll need to see what the development of night 5 & 6 will be like. Might be more realistic for us if we were to add the custom night with a 1.1 update after the full release.

And that’s the end of the Q&A!

Although we weren’t able to hit some of our goals, we’re heading into the new year with great ambitions and excitement as the next big update gets more and more closer to being ready.

Our AmberDrop team wishes you a much better and happier new year than 2020 ever was.

Stay safe and goodnight!

Martin

Hello everyone,

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic this year, we have been very fortunate that initially it didn’t affect us much, but unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. A few weeks ago, our main 3D artist and animator, Will, caught the virus and has been isolating himself in multiple quarantines. Luckily, he has successfully developed an immunity, had no life threatening complications and is on a path to a full recovery. Making things even harder, for some of us who study, our universities have been really pushing us for hard work to finish off this semester. December has been very stressful and it has been burning us out.
We were 90% sure that we would release the update before Christmas, but because of these unexpected circumstances and complications, we won’t be able to do so. We are deeply sorry for bringing you these disappointing news and not being able to hit the initial December release date. Our team does not believe in crunch time nor do we wan’t to take the time away from our families and work during the holidays, so we have decided to push the update to a later date this winter. This extra time will give us a chance to not only take a much needed break, but will also give us the opportunity to continue improving and adding more things to the game, making sure that we deliver the best experience possible when night 4 is ready.

Thank you for understanding. Stay safe, happy holidays, and I hope to talk to you again very soon :))

Martin, creator of TTFA

P.S. To end the year on something more or less positive, we plan to do one last Q&A for December. Feel free to ask us anything below this post in the comment section or send us your question on Twitter @amberdrop_devs or on our official TTFA discord server.