After countless weeks of non-stop development, I am proud to finally present to you quite possibly the most significant update this demo will ever receive! I had to go through multiple old to-do lists and write them all on my whiteboard to figure out how to organize all the changes! So without further ado, here are all the improvements in the 0.5 update!

Hands!

Humans have hands, and now you can too! If you look down while holding the flashlight, you will see that you are now indeed holding a flashlight!

Xbox 360 controller integration

I have an old ps3 controller that I emulate as a 360 controller, and it always makes me happy when I pick up a new game and it comes out of the box with controller support! Some games are just better with controllers. Technically the controller support isn’t perfect; the in-game pause menu cannot be navigated correctly at the moment with a controller and which button pauses is a bit unpredictable depending on the platform. But rest assured, all of the core gameplay might probably should work just fine, so feel free to plug away!

New interaction system

The old system seemed imprecise and made it virtually impossible to shut doors without hitting yourself in the face. It was based on zones surrounding objects that triggered upon walking into them, but this also meant you could face the opposite direction and still interact with something. We now have a new raycast based system! (I would make this font a flashing rainbow if Markdown allowed it.) Essentially this is an invisible line drawn out from the middle of your camera that detects what you’re looking at from a certain distance (this is how the clocks work too except their raycast is much longer.) So far this has proven to be a much superior system.

Subtitles!

There is a lot of spoken dialogue in the game, and I thought it would be appropriate to include subtitles for them. They can be switched off in the pause menu if you don’t want them, but by default, they will be on-screen to make sure players don’t miss any crucial plot elements! This also opens up the possibility of localization into other languages! I can’t make any promises yet, but I’ve programmed it with multiple languages in mind in case we do decide to localize!

Doors have new features!

Doors were a little boring before, not to mention sometimes problematic, and considering they are such an integral part of the game, I’ve spiced them up! Doors now:

• Will collide with the player and stop instead of impolitely pushing you across the room as if they somehow have enough potential energy to make your shoes slide across the floor.

• Make unique noises when opening/closing

• Make noises when bumping against the player, latching shut, and unlocking.

• Can be tried with any key and has one more button push to unlock so that the player understands when they use a key and when it doesn’t fit in a particular door.

New object models

Jordan is always light years ahead of me with his work because he makes a level after we’ve designed it, and then I could spend weeks just trying to make everything work. In addition to most of my work having to come after his as a necessity, I think programming in this instance is a more engaged process. So he’s decided (as he often does) to go back and redo a few objects that he didn’t like originally, plus at least one addition that I can think of. The most notable change you will see is that all the phonographs have a nice new model.

So many bug fixes I can’t even remember them all

Integrating every single piece of this has caused things to explode, so I’ve been trying to make all of these systems play nice with each other, and I think they should now for the most part. In addition to this, I’ve made the flashlight swaying act consistently across different framerates (it previously barely moved on high fps and flew off the screen on low fps) and footsteps now work in every part of the house as oppose to just in select areas.

If any of these things (or anything for that matter) breaks in one way or another in your playthrough, let me know in the comment section here, and I’ll see what I can do in the next patch. But with all the basic systems now mostly out of the way, it’s time for me to continue development on the rest of the full game! Hope to see everyone at release!

Also, the block of Colby Jack cheese previously stated to be lost in the last devlog has been located and is in good health.