Stay in the Light
1.03 Available, the game is free on sunsidegames.com
Also, Stay in the Light will be available for free on the www.sunsidegames.com website for the foreseeable future. Thank you to all the supporters of the game so far! Enjoy the update, and as always, have fun!
1.02 update released!
1.02 is up and contains mainly gameplay and level improvements:
- Better hand positioning for Mirror and Chalk. Different positions for each item, meant to be in more ideal placements for gameplay.
- Refined mirrors, crisper images and more useful reflecting what's behind you.
- Improved levels, especially in the latter half of the game.
- Newly improved hub point from level 6 and onward.
- Various minor bug fixes and graphics refinements.
Enjoy and have fun!!
1.01 released!
- Latest Unreal code 4.24.1. This includes various bug fixes, improvements, and ray tracing refinements Epic is adding.
- Invert mouse and controller preferences. This is the first of other controller preferences.
- Misc minor bug fixes and other usability refinements.
Enjoy! More to come! ːsteamhappyː
Stay in the Light released!
Stay in the Light 1.0 is released! Thank you to everyone who tested, supported and helped make this game possible. I'm not going to say a lot here, I'll let the game speak for itself.
I do want to give a quick reminder that this is a DX12, ray tracing game and as such requires a GTX or RTX card. It will play best on RTX getting over 60fps, but GTX owners can still play a ray tracing game at a good framerate (30+). There are video options built in that will allow you to tune that, and probably get 60fps on a GTX card, you would just have to reduce some ray tracing features.
Beyond that, enjoy the game and as always have fun!
New Beta and release date set!
The latest beta of Stay in the Light is up and the release date for the full game is set for next week! December 13, 2019. Yes, Friday the 13th. Expect to see a lot more changes and additions to go with this.
For now, enjoy the latest beta. Some of the additions and changes are:
- New voice acting and sound fx.
- New cutscene artwork.
- New interface elements.
- Many bug fixes, polished elements and refinements throughout.
There are a few more refinements to do, and it's largely come down to bug fixing and a few other release elements. Thanks and have fun!
Beta 1.44 now available!
- A full set of Audio preferences. Change and set all your volume sliders independently.
- Updated to the latest 4.24p3 codebase. Epic is making rapid improvements to RTX quality and performance, this build moves that along.
- If you get knocked out, He may steal some treasure you've collected. This makes Him more of a virtual opponent, with you trying to collect treasure and score and Him stealing it from you, taking it back.
- Improved video and RTX preferences. I let you turn off RTX shadows for the first time. SSGI is enabled by default as it looks good and runs fast. Of course set your preferences as you like.
- Improved game progression and story elements. It's not 100% there yet, but so very close now.
- Environment and level fixes, art improvements. Glowing glyphs appear where they should in the later levels.
Enjoy!
Beta 1.43 now available
- Gameplay improvements throughout. Improved layouts, hidden items and paths, better pacing and structure (although not finished yet). If you poke around you'll find hidden rooms and areas on every level, and this goes along with increasing non-linearity.
- The latest 4.24 unreal code. Epic released preview 2 of 4.24 yesterday, and I think it's a worthwhile upgrade. Final performance is still being worked on, but this new code runs faster, and conversely I'm increasing sampling rates as RTX performance improves.
- Bug fixes all over the place. Mostly has to do with overall pacing and structure, but also some improved elements and individual items.
Enjoy and as always have fun!
Beta 1.42 is up!
Whole bunch of stuff in this update, here's the rundown:
- New ambient life: Spiders. A few more tweaks needed for this but they are good to go.
- New optimizations for lower end systems. I'd like to make sure that the minspec can run the game at 30fps, this gets the game very close to that.
- Many gameplay tweaks and new or revised environment art. I'm constantly improving the art wherever possible, improving randomization and game progression. I'm seeing new randomized results even I didn't expect, and it's always great and surprising to see fresh environment generated by a system that you haven't seen before.
- Some new additions to Him to make his AI and behavior more dynamic. You'll probably recognize it when you see it.
- I'm giving players the choice of Raytraced AO or Raster AO in the prefs. On an RTX card, there is very little framerate difference, so the choice is largely aesthetic. RT AO is more physically accurate and realistic, Raster AO is more exaggerated and a typical look for games. For RTX owners I think this would largely come down to preference. But for lower end cards like a GTX 1060, Raster AO will probably be the preferred choice. On lower end systems Raster AO may provide a 2-3fps improvement, and may be the difference between 25 and 30fps for you. So this looks like it will probably be a good option to ship with.
Speaking of shipping, one more note: There will be another post soon to announce the release date of Stay in the Light! I have a few more details to figure out, but that is coming up soon. I'm excited to get the game done and get it into a wider release. So if you've been holding off to play the final game, you won't have much longer to wait.
Thanks and have fun!
Beta 1.4 released!
1.4 is up and this is the first release that is complete. Full disclosure: That doesn't mean SitL is polished at this point... I will be the first to say the game is rough around the edges. It needs work in several dimensions like animations, gameplay, interface and pacing. And those improvements are coming, but this is the first version of the game that is a complete game and is a major milestone in this development.
The next noteworthy element is the game is updated to the latest Unreal code, 4.23.1 that Epic released just days ago. It has significant ray tracing improvements, notably fixes and performance increases in reflection rendering and stability. I'm not seeing any performance or stability issues with this code, so likely this will be the version of the codebase the game ships with. If Epic releases 4.23.2 pretty soon and it has further improvements, I would probably spend the time to get updated to that. But its safe to assume no more code updates are needed.
A lot of work went into this release on the end of the game. Like many other things, it's not fully polished out yet but it is there. I will be gathering a lot more detailed tester feedback soon to get all of the issues really polished out and paced out right, and of course if you have any feedback now you can leave it in the forums or comment on this post!
Trading cards, badges, backgrounds and emoticons are also done. We're just waiting on Valve to do the approvals, so if it's not done soon it will definitely be done by the time the game releases.
All this means that the release date will be announced soon. I'm looking to make the game a little more well rounded before declaring a final release date but it's safe to say it's coming up. As always have fun and let me know what you think!
1.3.9 update is live!
1.3.9 is up and has a lot of improvements and fixes. Before I get to the list of changes, an important note about the size of this patch. It's a big one.
The reason the patch is so large is because the game has switched over to compressed files. Various optimizations make this possible now, the randomized levels are loaded into memory and then populated faster than before. The new compression scheme means the game got 1GB smaller on disk (basically shrank from 3GB to 2GB). The downside is most of the game has to be patched to make this work. I think the size of this update will be a one-time thing, there may be large updates in the future but nothing again this big. So I apologize for the large update, and I promise it's a good optimization that paves the way to get the game one step closer to final release.
Ok with that out of the way, here are the other changes:
- New rooms and environments. Completely new space to explore the further you go in, including new 3 and 4 way junctions making the lower levels more nonlinear. This will hopefully make your chalk more useful, if you get lost use it to mark where you've been (draw arrows on the wall, mark numbers down, its up to you).
- Work on the endgame level, partially implemented gameplay and art.
- Talking to the dead is now activated with left mouse button, and there's an ingame tip to let you know this.
- Improved gameplay and visual FX with the silver magic mirror.
- Faster level generation! Did I mention 1GB smaller on disk? =)
- Improved ladders and other collision fixes.
- General bug fixes all over the place.
- Better UltraWide support in the menu and UI.
Thanks everyone, hope you enjoy! Have fun!