I've spent this past week replaying 1.0 (spoilers: it sucked) to see what I should and shouldn't change.

Here are the results:

1 - Hard Mode is going to be fully replaced by a new "game mode" of sorts. It will be similar in concept, but different enough.

The no-death stars honestly felt like filler to me (I think in the Rebranded games they're fine, but in a game like this maybe they weren't really needed) so it will be an all-in-one package now.

Before, if you died in any of the main nights, you had to replay from the very beginning. If you happened to die both in normal and hard mode, then you had to play at least 20 nights (considering you didn't cheat, that is.) It wasn't that fun.

This new game mode will probably be one of the last things done for the game, as I'm still planning out the details of it.

2 - Jake is gonna get a completely new mechanic. The other one ended up becoming too repetitive once you learned were all of his batteries were, since they would always spawn in the same place. (combine that with the whole 20 nights thingy and you got yourself a recipe for disaster and boredom, alongside pain and misery)

Not only that, but as mentioned in Devlog 3, it was very hard to balance.

The new one will still include the attic and having to search for something, but it'll hopefully be more engaging.

I'm not going to reveal any of the new mechanics until the game releases (too much trashtalking from a certain person, sorry.) but I'll probably post screenshots of them once they're ready.

I'm currently focusing on optimizing the code of the entire game (not just the gameplay, but everything). 1.0's was very bad and difficult to understand at times, so it became difficult to work with it, and I need a solid foundation to be able to add new things more easily.

Right now I'm doing the cutscenes. Before, every single line of dialogue was hardcoded (even if you don't understand programming, you can probably tell it wasn't the best decision.)

They're not anymore, the process is "automated", so to speak. And it is indeed a lot easier to work with them now.

I've also gone ahead and improved the way they look a little bit. Just a black background was boring, ngl. You can see how they look like at the top of the post.

(The font had to be changed because, weirdly enough, it wasn't compatible with Direct3D11. Not sure why...)

EDIT: Gamejolt's compression completely ruined the image, wow.

That is all for today. The next devlog will probably happen once I have finished optimizing the entire game, and I have something interesting to show.

I'm gonna take a nap now, see ya~