Found-footage vibes, improved ragdolls, more options, localization, a new basement, and more!

Finally got a preview build out! I’ve been fiddling with a lot of systems, but this should be a pretty stable point to release at.

First up: there are lots of new settings, including “mutators” to modify how the game behaves:

• Making yourself (or everyone) imperceptible, or just blocking sight/sound/touch
• Making the monster perfectly aware of where its prey is
• Disabling digestion
• Preventing Fen from actually grabbing you (i’m sure someone can find a reason for this, somehow)

These have been very useful for me while debugging things, and I figured it’d be nice to be able to watch Fen go to town without having to mess with the tiny debug menus too much (:

Localization is pretty well-established. I haven’t translated all of the settings descriptions, but most of everything else has gotten a translation. Note that these are mostly machine-translations. Therefore, there are almost certainly errors. If you’re a native speaker and can see something that’s wrong, let me know about it! I’d really appreciate the help.

I figure that, for the time being, at least, these will be helpful for people who don’t know much English. I’d like to include Chinese and Japanese as well, but I need to figure out a new font for that…

There are more visual styles now – notably, you can enable a “found footage” aesthetic. It adds film grain, lens distortion, and a big chunk of bloom. I like it quite a bit…but it is optional, since it’s a lot. Also, the day/dusk/night selector in the House scene has been spruced up a little, with proper color temperature.

Yeet. Depending on how hungry it’s set to be (look under Difficulty!), Fen might decide to just throw you instead of eating you like a grape. Those who just want to be eaten should set it to Ravenous (:

I’ve made a ton of other changes that I’ve kind of lost track of. So, uh, here’re my Git commit messages:

• Refresh the basement; optimize the menu

Every single submenu was getting drawn and updated all of the time. They’re now disabled when not visible, which saves a decent chunk of framaetime – I was seeing about 1.5ms getting wasted!

• Fix day/night setter; fix lightmapping on rooms; add flashlight

You can now push F to turn on a flashlight. It flickers sometimes. Scary. I’ve also kind of improved the state of the lightmapping – but there are still some weird blobs and errors on some surfaces.

• Add mutators. Update credits. Update basement scene

The basement scene has been redone a bit. I still need to figure out what to do with it, but it looks nicer now!

• Add quality setting; add title bar to menu

You can now properly switch between low/medium/high quality presets. These are mostly just the defaults provided by Unity. This should help those having performance issues.

• Add some more content preferences

You can adjust how much weight gain takes places (the default is what I enjoy), and you can also make Fen look more feminine. Booba.

• Redo Fen’s AI; redo ragdolls

I was wildly misusing the ragdoll system. The prey’s body was getting left behind when the ragdoll was thrown…

So, that’s a lot better now. It still freaks out sometimes, especially when Fen shoves you into a wall. I’ll need to look into that.

• Fix a dynamic resolution bug

I think this got released already, but due to an error in how I calculated the dynamic resolution target, the resolution would crater if you were getting a steady 60 FPS (or whatever your refresh rate is). Oops!

I think that’s it! Next up is…maybe hiding places? I want to let you hide in cupboards, or in vents, or other places that Fen can fish you out of like the last pringle at the bottom of the tube.