Hey everyone! Welcome to the November 2022 Status Update! I want to talk about the future of status updates from this forward.
Besides working on Hack’s Custom Night, most of the time has been put into me finding a job and working on other fangame projects. However, if I were to be completely honest, the majority of the time was always been me being lazy and falling asleep. Even then, sometimes I had to deal with random events going on in my personal life. Besides some annoying and overwhelming obstacles, to those I am contributing to their projects for art or programming, I sincerely apologize.
However, after a long while of dealing with those uncertain and unnecessary obstacles, I have decided to figure out a system to treat those obstacles from hindering my and other people’s work. With the help of my Discord server, I have created a small poll on how I should be consistent on creating new devlogs. After some time, the majority voted that I should create a new status update for Hack’s Custom Night every two months!
Yup, that’s right! That will be the new direction on how I’ll create new updates for the game. Here’s how I’ll make this work in full detail.
What are your "monthly status updates"? And how will it work?
To put it simply, I will be creating a new status update of Hack’s Custom Night every two months. Within those content, it will feature progress that was made within those two months. However, the catch is that the amount of content within the article varies, meaning no matter if I have anything to say regarding the updates of Hack's Custom Night, I will still post it.
Now it may sound like it'll be pressuring for me to force myself to implement something major into the game to keep the status updates more interesting, however, that is actually far from it! The way I see it is that it'll help motivate me to work on Hack's Custom Night more stealthily including other projects I am working on. I can't guarantee that it'll be the case since this is the first post, but I hope it'll be enough for me to make up for all the quiet progress for other projects I'm helping out with.
I plan on releasing a devlog every month on the 20th at any time of the day. So, unfortunately, consistent timing of the day may not be viable as of right now.
With that being said, here's what I'll say for this month!
Beginner Friendly Features
A lot of FNaF fangames I have seen over the past years have been leaning toward long-time fans of the community. While it is great to keep the current audience interested and engaged, I feel it would be more appropriate to try and make Hack's Custom Night more beginner-friendly.
I have developed a couple of features that would help lead new FNaF fans and new players in general to the right direction when playing the game. I've added a Difficulty option, a Tutorials tab, and a handful of Dialogue scenes to keep the players naturally instructed in the game.
The Difficulty options will only include Easy and Normal.
Easy Mode will include a number of differences in gameplay to make the nights naturally easier. It is mainly recommended for new players who have not played a FNaF game.
Normal Mode will retain features that were 100% intended to be in Hack's Custom Night. However, the nights will generally be much more difficult and rewarding than Easy Mode nights, mainly intended for veteran FNaF players to have a good challenge.
You are allowed to change the difficulty option at any time, so don't feel bad if you're gonna play Easy Mode for the whole game! My goal with these new features is to bring in new players, fans, and general audience to Hack's Custom Night much easier. I hope it works well for everyone.
I have not developed the Tutorials and Dialogue scenes far enough to showcase them here, but the programming is finished for both of those!
The idea is that the Tutorials tab will include basic instructions on dealing with certain areas and tidbits of the game in full detail. Any article of the tab will be unlocked once you have reached to an area that requires that information.
As for the Dialogue scenes, I cannot go into a lot of detail about them. However, they will present certain information that may be crucial for gameplay is all I will say for now.
Scrapped Menu Themes
Yup, that's right. There were going to be menu themes for Hack's Custom Night. What are they exactly? They were originally going to be included in the "Night Menus" where you can simply change the look of the menu. You can change the menu to have the visuals of any of the mainline Five Nights at Freddy's series or the Fanverse entries! The visuals were going to be near perfect accurate to those original games.
Now, why did I scrap this? As I was developing each theme, I realized that implementing different menu themes would hinder the main Hack's Custom Night menu. The main theme is planned to be more dynamic than any of the menus from other FNaF games. Implementing the menu themes to be accurate to the original into the dynamic theme would be very difficult to add, not to mention the assets from the original games. I feel saddened not to be able to add the feature, as it would have suited veteran FNaF players and fans, and knowing this is actually the second time menu themes were canceled. (The first time is custom title screen themes of the game.)
Maybe one day it will come back in some shape or form, but it just could not be added at this time.
Discord Server Limited Link??
If you are reading this, you may be lucky to see that there is a Hack's Custom Night Discord Server invite link available for you! It does not feature much than me asking survey questions from time to time. If you are interested to join early before the demo is released, feel free to do so! Just know there REALLY isn't much.
Anyway, that is all I have for this devlog. I hope you all have a good Thanksgiving! If you don't celebrate that, I hope you have a good holiday!
— HackGame 💜
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