Hope y'all are doing well. February has wrapped up, and I've been at the grind! With the Second Demo released and some net positive feedback, I'm continuing the game's development for a proper full release!

I've been occupied and locked into development that out of fear to not kill my development momentum, I didn't write this development update last week. So with that said...

What have I been doing?

As I mentioned in last month's Devlog, development progress slowed down as I added a couple of projects to my plate which would pay me, so I had to dedicate part of my work time to making my part in those projects. It was only at the last week of February that I could fully dedicate the days to Manalith's development. I'm not just doing this for passion, you know! I'm working full-time on this game!

But what I have added to the game is Night 4. It introduces a new enemy and the third upgradeable defense, as well as new Evolution Stages for basically most of the already-present enemies.

Something's in the Study with you, and... Now there are two gems on the desk!

Night 4 with all enemies at their easiest, or Night 4 MIN, is pretty crazy. It's a slightly harder version of Night 3 MAX, with all enemies at their hardest. But Night 4 MAX... Is actually insane. It had to go through a handful of nerfs and balance adjustments before it reached an iteration that felt challenging but not overtly stressful and unfair.

The Night 4 enemy may not be much of a threat, but the other Manaspawn... Oh-ho-ho... They're absolute menaces. And the Night 4 enemy indirectly makes them all more dangerous to deal with when it attacks. Because of this and some feedback I took notes of, after I finished preliminary development of Night 4, I took a step back and began to do a round of fixes.

Improvements from the Demo

When your Mana Supply runs low, the screen will begin to darken, and you will hear a ringing effect slowly grow louder the closer your Supply is to 0. It will hopefully make those moments more tense, and also connect this to the narrative. Tellany doesn't burn the midnight oil; she doesn't have any! She instead burns the midnight mana.

I slightly streamlined the process of retrying nights after getting a Game Over. Players can now immediately retry a night without needing to reconfigure enemy Growth Levels and Defense Levels every attempt, but they can still return to the Manaspawn Management screen to do any modifications they'd like. Furthermore, you can now restart and quit mid-night by holding down on some keyboard keys. But don't worry, that's all the keyboard will be for gameplay!

I also changed the presentation of the Victory Screen, making better use of space but still showing practically the same information it did in the Demos.

Night 0 got some tweaks with an enhanced tutorial. The player should be able to know what are the UI elements that aren't self-explanatory. But I figured that won't be enough, so for Night 0 only, time and power will be frozen, allowing the player to freely mess around with the controls and figure out what everything does. The player gets to choose when they feel ready to start the night, at which point Manalith will begin to attack.

The last quality-of-life improvement I implemented is an indicator for which direction the player is facing. I noticed in many playtests that players wouldn't realize they were facing an incorrect direction when under attack by an enemy- usually Manalith or Aerous. They would use a wall where there was no threat, and they would either lose mana or lose altogether. Hopefully the indicator should serve as an additional guide for the player to know where they need to defend.

I wrapped up the implementation of these improvements just last week, so the development for Night 5 is what March shall be for~

That's all for this development update. Progress should pick a greater pace this month now that I have no other projects to hold me back. I still got a long way to go before I can release the full game, but I'll give it my all! See you on Spring, everyone!