Previous Devlogs: https://ironproject.itch.io/pitchblack/devlog

Yes, although it was quite a struggle to set up the game's page for Steam with it's such high standards, I was still able to make a lot of progress!

Gameplay

The next monster is pretty much finished, I just need to give him sound and get him to appear all around the next puzzle area.

The next thing to work on is a new system for the candle, making the candlestick last for a limited amount of time. Whenever you put out the light, you'll also need to use matches to relight it, making you think more carefully about putting it out when you need to hide. I'm not 100% sure this feature will make the game fairer, but it'll give the player more incentive to search chests.

Atmosphere

Soon I'll also improve, in general, the sounds and ambiance. Currently, most of the time, there is complete silence, but I want a sort of very (and I mean very) subtle whistling wind sound through the caves. And then, on top of that, you would occasionally get a larger gust of wind blowing through in larger areas.

Optimizations

Another big thing I've been working on is improving the game's optimization, like how I recently figured out that Godot (the engine I use for my games) allows both '.wav' and '.ogg' files, but I had no idea how much smaller Ogg files are to Wav. I've now decreased the game's size from over 150 MBs to just under 50 MBs just by turning all of the music files from Wav to Ogg. The best part is that they're almost identical unless, of course, you see it's "songfile.ogg" instead of "songfile.wav." On top of that, I've been improving Memory usage by making some files only load when they're needed, the biggest culprit being (just like with storage) music. This is because I had all the in-game music 'preloaded' when the game started (including The Monsters Wait, Caves I, and Caves II), and I just switched between them. Now they only load when they're played, which will also help when I add the rest of the music.

Game Page + Final Notes

And now, as a reminder, I have set up the game page for Steam. If you use Steam, please wishlist it! I still plan to release the game on GameJolt, but only if my Marketplace Account gets accepted. Since I'm now on Steam I will try to start posting all future devlogs there, too.

One more thing I'd like to mention is that there are now a total of 4 ways to die—yay!

So that's all for this post, it'll be a lot longer till the next Devlog post, and there're mainly two reasons for that. First: the game is still so far from being done, that I'm going to be focusing most of my time on the game itself, with less focus on small improvements, music that I can finish later, and anything that I can put off to the side so I can get this game to a finished state. Second: I have three different platforms to publish these devlogs to; give me a break. Don't worry, though, because I will still let you all experience pitch black very soon...