Hi everyone, happy December! A month to celebrate many things, even though most people would only associate it with Christmas.
Today, I have a lot of stuff to showcase regarding HCN's current position and direction! I know in many devlogs in the past I have said they are usually exciting, but I feel this one is very important, as this signifies a milestone for Hack's Custom Night's development. For this log, I'll be going over New Gameplay Mechanics, Extras Menu (wip), and Play Testing (with Gameplay Footage!) Without further ado, let's take a look at them!
New Gameplay Mechanics
Driver Manager
Furthermore in adding more purpose to viewing the office more is the Driver Manager! (or, the FNaF 3 device system lol) In front of you is a computer with a monitor that also connects to the tablet with three buttons: Cam Tools, Ventilation, and Reboot All. If any one of your devices, starts to have an error, you need to click the device button to start the repair process, wait around four seconds without opening the tablet until it's finished.
Like the flashlight mechanic, I was personally hesitant on implementing this mechanic due to the amount of gameplay mechanics present in the game. I wanted the gameplay style to have more freedom while also not be too restrictive.
Flashlight Mechanic
The other day, I mentioned how I've implemented the flashlight mechanic due to the imbalanced time in viewing the office and the tablet. After I've implemented the flashlight in some mechanics, I've created the visuals for it! As you can see, keeping the flashlight on will drain its battery, completely separate from the main power system. The longer you have on, the more it drain as indicated by the indicator. I figured having a faint battery UI would be unique and less cluttered for HCN, but let me know what you all think about the design.
Extras Menu (Sound Test)
As a small programming addition, I've decided to create a Sound Test submenu for the Extras! A menu where you can play any sample of the game, ranging from music, sound effects, and voices. If you've noticed from the screenshot, the index to look over the samples is in hexadecimal, meaning you can reach from sample 1 to 256! The reason why it's formatted like this is mainly to replicate one of my childhood games, being the classic Sonic the Hedgehog games! I always admire how obscure the hexadecimal format is used just to play different musics and sound effects.
Though knowing how big Hack's Custom Night is planned, I'm not very sure if I can fit every sample into one 8-bit integer limit (0-255.) If I managed to reach the limit, I'll likely split the background music, sound effects, and voice lines into two maps of 8-bit integer limits to make it a lot more fitting.
My current plans for the sound test menu is to implement QOL features where you can flexibly play and roam various samples around. This is mainly stuff like play/pause button, fade in/out option, sample scrubbing, and a volume slider. ?Now implementing these features into this menu may sound pretty useless at first, but if you really take the grand scheme of things, adding features like this help polish up any concept whether if it is simple or complicated shine more brightly. It's always best to give bits and pieces a coat of paint that can help build the final product well. This applies the same for other menus I'll be developing, so I hope you'll enjoy those too.
Music Composers
On a different department of HCN’s development are the music composers! A few months ago, I’ve published a help wanted post on needing more musicians. After some time has passed, I am happy to say that we have two new composers who are joining development.
Everyone, please welcome, @ExpoDev 
and @Charlie_Caelo 
!
They'll be composing various different tracks for Hack's Custom Night, from a large variations of nights to different menus and events! Both of the composers, including long-time composer @carrot113 
have been fantastic in working with me on getting the soundtrack done. We have one new night track completed for Hack's Custom Night from the new composers, and I cannot express how awesome their music fits into the direction of the game. You can check out their work using these links here:
Play Testing
Yes, it is true, Hack's Custom Night finally at least playable! After painstakingly working on programming the base gameplay structure and characters, I've managed to get a playable gameplay build out for all the play- and bug-testers!
I didn't exactly intend on having to create a playable build this month as I was working on other characters, but I felt the amount of character threats is enough to have the game be feasible to roam around. So I've decided to string together every completed screen and frames made thus far for the testers to easily play the game without clicking on obscure buttons. (lol) Although at the moment, frames like the splash screen and the title menu don’t have many visuals due to me wanting to tying them together over with. The one thing I’ve tried to stray away from is being a perfectionist, as it did hinder a lot of my work, whether if it’s my project or others. I feel that the pressure of the fangame community and my peers made me demotivated to simply work on simple concepts, as communities and meta grows, so does the expectations of any content creation.
In hindsight though, having to actually string together various programmed screens together made me feel fulfilled to see the game like an actual storyboard. Just seeing each frame like splash screens, title screen, menus, and gameplay loop all around looked more promising to see the game actually work well together. Having any tester or player play the builds not only made me personally proud of myself, but it also made me learn a lot of what's in the game development process as a director. Sure in the past I have let a closed amount of players test REALLY early builds to test out various programming, but nothing has felt more satisfying than to see actual gameplay be played by other people.
Provided by two bug testers, Zombie and Syl, we have their own gameplay footage of Hack's Custom Night! As you can see, the gameplay is very much completed in its base form! Even with some rough edges and placeholders, I am proud with how far this game has gone with players actually enjoying the builds, inside or outside of the testing team.
I would like to thank the following people for contributing and helping me for the past 30 days to get to this point of development. Thank you to the playtesters, (Zombie, Syl, Sketch, StarStreak, Tar Bunny, and Tai,) the music composers, (Carrot, Charlie, and ExpoDev,) and the artists (check game page description.)
Seeing the progress of the entire build is personally astonishing to me, as I never thought in all of 5 1/2 years of development would I ever see actual people play the game that shows potential promise.
I hope in the next devlog I get to work on more character mechanics while providing more enhancements for the game. (and hope to god i don't rush another devlog)
Until then, see you in the next post!~
— Hack 💜
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