Hey everyone, long time no see!

As you can tell, there hasn't been any post or newsletter about Hack's Custom Night for a few months now. I'll going over what's been going on during the time.

First, there had been a lot of changes happening to my personal life that is making things harder for me to work on my projects. I won't go into too much detail, but lets just say that my schedule has overhauled by a significant amount through a couple of life factors that has significantly limited the amount of time I have for my projects.

Second, I've been changing up priorities in my daily life to ensure my mental health in check. As HCN's development changes drastically at nearly every point, adjustments to how the final game will be made has become very stressful. A lot of what seemed to be finalized kept getting severely overhauled due to the roster cast constantly changing. Any point of the cast changing can affect the gameplay through its overall difficulty and the general balance.

Third, I've been making a massive change for Hack's Custom Night that requires a lot of time, but won't necessarily change the time of the game being developed as you may expect. It's been a difficult decision to get to this point but, Hack's Custom Night is now using the Game Maker engine.

So, why did I switch to Game Maker?

Clickteam Fusion 2.5+ simply isn't a software I can tolerate any longer. I've dealt with countless crashes and corruptions that nearly costed a lot of mine and other projects' work and time. It has gotten to a point where "breaking Clickteam's limitation" charm just isn't as fun anymore.

After switching to Game Maker, I've realized that Clickteam Fusion 2.5 as a software and design isn't enjoyable as I remembered it being. It could likely be because of how advanced I like my programming to go, but I find Game Maker to have a more easier, intuitive, and comfortable design more than Clickteam's.

And indeed easier it is! Using the programming knowledge I've inherited from the Clickteam software, using Game Maker isn't as bad as I thought it would be! I thought it would take a few months to get a hang of it, but only after a few days of using the software (started using it around 06-28-2024 or 06-30-2024,) programming in it is an absolute cake walk! There is so much more flexibility and compatibility compared to the Clickteam engine that makes things work more stable and smoothly!

What's going to happen with the work done in Clickteam?

As mentioned before, Hack's Custom Night started development since June 28, 2018, which is around the time I started using the Clickteam engine, making the original project file six years old. Because a lot of stuff needs to be implemented to Game Maker, it'll take a while to program everything to the engine whether or not I know every coding technique or language.

However, when it comes to what to do with the original file, I've been personally debating whether or not I should release it to the public. Despite a lot of work being done with several characters (not mentioned) implemented into the game, it still has a lot of rough edges while still being playable. I don't feel interested in going back to Clickteam to fix certain issues that take a bit to resolve, because I already don't feel comfortable with the way the software has been giving me trouble.

That being said, I've decided I'll give you all the decision regarding the Clickteam build of Hack's Custom Night.

I'll be dubbing the old Clickteam build,

"Hack's Custom Night - Legacy Alpha Build."

It's the Hack's Custom Night build developed over the nearly six years of development with many rough edges regarding visuals and functionality. If you all are more than okay in playing an unfinished and rough build, please comment in this post on what you think the fate of the build should be.

To end this post, here is footage on an outdated but newly presented build of HCN!