Night 4 has been finally added to "Try to Fall Asleep" Early Access! Post night 4 launch news article will be coming from us later on Steam.
Thank you everyone for your patience and the long wait. We hope you'll enjoy night 4 as much as we enjoyed making it :))
Goodnight, the Amberdrop dev team
Night 4 - Release Date revealed!
Good evening,
After months of waiting and many unexpected delays, we’re finally ready to announce the release date for the 4th night of “Try to Fall Asleep”.
[previewyoutube="7fKRVfYb_KE;full"]
It has been a long wait for sure, and for us to finally announce a solid release date for Night 4 - it feels unreal, but at the same time it’s absolutely amazing. Right now, we’re finalizing the main components of the 4th night and doing the last few adjustments and polishes before the release.
Night 4 is gonna be an amazing ride, and we hope that you’ll all enjoy it when it goes live this Saturday!
Goodnight, Martin
"Try to Fall Asleep" Community Transmission #4 - February 2021
Good evening players,
It's been a while since we did a community transmission on the game’s development progress, so it’s finally time to fix that! Being our first post this year, we hope that everyone has had a decent start of the new year and we wish that it’ll only start to get better from here on out.
So, how have we been doing? What have we been up to? WHAT’S UP WITH NIGHT 4?? We’ll try to get you all up to date with the development of night 4 as much as possible and show some really cool stuff as well.
How are we doing?
Apart from one complication, which we’ll get back to later in the post, we’ve been getting along pretty nicely. Like we said previously, December and January were quite tough because some of us were doing uni exams and final assignments. Our 3D artist, Will, who caught the Corona virus has fully recovered and is feeling better than ever. In february, we’ve been able to focus way more on the game and do a lot of great work for the game, adding more things and polishing the overall gameplay. So overall, we’re all ok and for the most part development is going smoothly :))
NIGHT 4
We know that you’ve been waiting for this update for a while now, and adding more time to that wait is really hard for us as well. Game development is hard, and for this to be a first game for a small team like ours is no easy task and sometimes things happen which are out of our hands. While making this game, we’re also learning, growing and getting better as game developers as well. We’ve already learned so much and gained some skill at it, but there’s always still some room for improvement. Let’s take the opportunity to share some insights...
Development progress of Night 4
Currently, most of the main game stuff has been implemented. Taking everything into consideration, excluding one element of night 4, we estimate that the Night 4 Update is around 95% done. All we need to do in terms of pure gameplay is to simply playtest, debug, polish and adjust a few values. If it wasn’t for that one element of night 4, theoretically we could release it within 1-2 weeks.
That one thing about Night 4...
With each new night, we try to raise the bar ever so slightly higher, so we can try new things, challenge ourselves, gain new knowledge and in the result release better and better content, and become better developers as well. This time with night 4, one of our biggest ambitions yet was to try doing full human body and facial animations. We were fully ready to tackle this challenge, but unfortunately we were influenced by forces that were out of our control, such as our 3D artist getting Covid-19 and getting occupied with university. And in the result, this later turned out to be the biggest cause for night 4 delays. At first, we tried to do it ourselves, but after trying to self-teach advanced Blender rigging and animations, we realised that we couldn’t do it ourselves without any additional help. Luckily, after a week long search for animators, we’ve found a wonderful animator, who’ll be joining our team and helping us out to make some great animations.
Now, there’s always been debates surrounding cutscenes in games and the whole “Games are not movies" agenda. To some extent, we agree - a game is a game first, and the rest comes along. So, maybe it might seem weird for our small team to delay the game and put so much work into this part of night 4. I don’t want to delve on this too much, but I’ll try to share our simple point of view.
Basically, we planned this to be the last part of night 4 that we work on. Everything else - gameplay, story, levels, main features etc. were worked on first. So, this part of the game never stole any time and resources from any other parts/elements of night 4. In fact, due to the delays, it actually gave us some extra time to work on other smaller things.
Now that the game is at its midpoint, and we’re familiar with the game’s setting and world, we can also start to dive deeper into the story and lore. And what better way to do it than with a direct confrontation between characters! It’s also a very special scene that is quite pivotal, and will set the tone for the last 3 nights. That’s why it’s so important to us, and well, it's gonna be pretty cool :))
Night 4 gameplay preview
Earlier today we premiered a brand new footage of some gameplay from Night 4. In it, you can see some key game mechanics as well as some of the new locations in the underground.
[previewyoutube="yQ8M_QXoUdg;full"]
And that’s it for now! Thank you once again for sharing your support and enthusiasm about what we make. It really means a lot to us, and we can’t wait to finally release Night 4 into the world. More news and info will come later this down the road ;))
Goodnight, ~Martin
Q&A December 2020
Good evening players! Martin here,
Wanted to start off this post by saying thanks to everyone who were incredibly supportive in the previous Steam post. It’s pretty heartwarming to have such cool fans. You’re all amazing <3
Before we finally let go of this horrific year, we wanted to do one last Q&A. So, without further ado, let’s end 2020 on a high note and dive into your questions!
Are there any secrets in any of the nights? Yes, there are quite a few. Some are more straightforward, and some are more well hidden and a bit more meta. Of course, when night 4 comes out, there will be even more. On night 4, you’ll get to discover one of the biggest secrets of the Pinetree island and unravel the mystery surrounding it. It’s gonna be great and our team can’t wait for you all to experience it for the first time!
Are you guys planning on having multiple endings? We see the appeal of multiple endings, but when it comes to our game, it’s not a concept that works with our game. We want to tell a story that fits in our game’s overall canon. Having multiple endings, kinda makes it difficult to do something beyond the current game...
You have some interesting videos posted on the AmberDrop youtube channel, (i.e This is Revivel). Anything hidden in them? OFFICIAL STATEMENT: The Revivel company is aware of the tempered advertisement material. The reason why these videos have been distorted/tampered with is yet unknown. Revivel will do everything necessary to stop the spread of these videos as they are damaging to the company’s reputation and PR.
Will you upload more trailers, or will it come the night 4 first? I think we could do one more short trailer for the launch of night 4. That would be pretty cool, right?
Have you guys thought about making Try to Fall Asleep a VR game also? Yes. It has been one of the most asked questions and we know it’s something that people would really like to see. However, we don’t want to make just a straightup VR port of the game. There are reasons why VR is so appealing. It’s not just because of the visuals, but it also has to do with game mechanics that are specific and exclusive to VR. I think we would end up with a lot better VR experience if we made it from ground up to be meant for VR. Although we’re thinking about it, please don’t mistake this as a conformation for anything. If we’ll ever decide to do something in VR we’ll let you know, but our main focus is currently on the main game.
Will there be more game modes like "easy, medium, hard" and maybe an endless night where you see how long you can last for the part where you try to sleep? A custom night is something that we’re definitely interested in. As to when we should add it, we’re not sure yet… We’d like to add it when the game transitions into a full release (1.0), so we can include all the customization options from all 6 nights. But, we’ll need to see what the development of night 5 & 6 will be like. Might be more realistic for us if we were to add the custom night with a 1.1 update after the full release.
And that’s the end of the Q&A!
Although we weren’t able to hit some of our goals, we’re heading into the new year with great ambitions and excitement as the next big update gets more and more closer to being ready.
Our AmberDrop team wishes you a much better and happier new year than 2020 ever was.
Stay safe and goodnight!
Martin
Bad news...
Hello everyone,
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic this year, we have been very fortunate that initially it didn’t affect us much, but unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. A few weeks ago, our main 3D artist and animator, Will, caught the virus and has been isolating himself in multiple quarantines. Luckily, he has successfully developed an immunity, had no life threatening complications and is on a path to a full recovery. Making things even harder, for some of us who study, our universities have been really pushing us for hard work to finish off this semester. December has been very stressful and it has been burning us out. We were 90% sure that we would release the update before Christmas, but because of these unexpected circumstances and complications, we won’t be able to do so. We are deeply sorry for bringing you these disappointing news and not being able to hit the initial December release date. Our team does not believe in crunch time nor do we wan’t to take the time away from our families and work during the holidays, so we have decided to push the update to a later date this winter. This extra time will give us a chance to not only take a much needed break, but will also give us the opportunity to continue improving and adding more things to the game, making sure that we deliver the best experience possible when night 4 is ready.
Thank you for understanding. Stay safe, happy holidays, and I hope to talk to you again very soon :))
Martin, creator of TTFA
P.S. To end the year on something more or less positive, we plan to do one last Q&A for December. Feel free to ask us anything below this post in the comment section or send us your question on Twitter @amberdrop_devs or on our official TTFA discord server.
IMPORTANT PATCH - 0.3.4a
Good evening players,
Today we're releasing a small, but a very important patch to the game - 0.3.4a.
This patch will address 2 main things:
1) We reworked the game save system which now won't be affected by future game updates. Previously a game update would completely reset all game save data. We've seen some people reporting this issue and we hope to resolve it with this patch. Important note: THIS PATCH WILL RESET YOUR SAVE DATA.
2) Some people have had issues with the early access not launching after trying out the demo. Basically, we tried to make it so that the demo and the early access would use the same save data, so you wouldn't have to replay the first night if you completed it in the demo. Unfortunately, this had caused some people to have data conflicts and the early access would not boot up at all. For those who had issues, we highly recommend giving the game another try after updating the game with this patch.
This patch also includes a few small fixes/improvements:
Improved game performance when rendering high fidelity vegetation.
Fixed Murgs peeking animations.
Fixed Close the Doors minigame screen fade after winning.
Fixed a screen fade and double panting in the 1st dream's ending.
Added an icon which shows how a fuse looks like after interacting with the generator.
Fixed boat occlusion culling.
Improved watchtower climbing - will further improve it in the future.
Performance improvements for the first 2 dream sequences.
That's it for the Halloween update. Now we’re heading back to work on the 4th night!
Goodnight.
"Try to Fall Asleep" Community Transmission #3 - October 2020
Good evening players,
Welcome to our Community Transmission #3 for October of 2020! In this one, we’ll talk all about the special Halloween Update which arrives today - just in time for the spookiest week of the year!
Let’s dive into CT#3!
As October is heading into its final week, the Halloween Update is what you seek!
So, what exactly is the Halloween Update?
Well, the truth is that October 31st was supposed to be our original release date for night 4, but unfortunately, we won’t be able to hit that date as we still need a bit more time to work on it. That said, we still wanted to release something for you all on Halloween, so we decided to release a nice update for the first 3 nights of the game. It’s still a pretty considerable update, which consists of tons of improvements and bug fixes, as well as a few new features that we think the players will really enjoy.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s in the Halloween Update!
There are many small and big things that we've done since the last update, but for this CT we'll mainly focus on the most notable ones.
Performance and stability improvements
Some of the most notable improvements are in the game’s stability and performance. We went through each level and cleaned up the scripts and optimised the meshes for a better performance and stability of the game. We hope that after this update, players won’t experience as many crashes as they did before.
Volume slider.
Yes, FINALLY! :’)) (Available through the settings menu)
HUD clean up
We took a more minimalistic approach with the Heads up Display and refreshed the HUD to be as simple and unobtrusive as possible. With a new font, it’s different from the game menus, so that the player can easily differentiate what’s part of the gameplay and what’s a game menu element.
Visual improvements
Optimising the game’s performance allowed us to increase the visual fidelity on the Pinetree Island, so once again the entire island has been updated with new tree and bush models, better grass and terrain textures. On top of it, we tuned the post processing effects to be slightly more realistic and more coherent across all levels.
New sounds and more effects
There is a new sound effect that plays when you get one stress bar and on the 2nd dream phase we added a few more creepy ambient sounds to make the island more haunting. For the falling asleep sequences we added a scanline effect that works as a visual cue for when the stress is getting too high. Voiceover also gets a slight update with a few retakes, which improve the overall narrative of the game.
New footstep sound system
For the second dream phase there is a new, more advanced footstep sound system that can detect on which texture the player is currently standing on and change the array of footstep sounds based on that. Additionally, we’ve added a few more footstep sounds when walking on grass, sand and rock.
Improved 2nd dream phase mechanics
One of the biggest changes that we’ve done for this update is for the 2nd dream phase. We know that for many people the 2nd night was their least favorite night, so we decided to do something about it! For the most part, the 2nd dream phase still will work the same - you’ll have to find pages based on clues that were left in the previous pages. But, as soon as you’ll pick up a page, the whole level will go pitch black, including your flashlight. Your only guide will be a strange light that will unpredictably try to flee from you. If you lose it, you’ll be left in the dark and whatever was chasing you from behind will get you more effortlessly. It will be interesting to see what people will think of this new change and we’ll tune it based on player feedback.
Improved minigames for the 1st dream phase
In this update you’ll get a chance to try out the new reworked level of the reach the end minigame. With more side rails, better platforms and lighting, we have improved one of the hardest and most frustrating parts of the game. The “Close the Doors” has also received some minor detail improvements.
Game update versions explained
Sometimes some people by mistake have thought that the game has had a full release, so in order to reduce the confusion in the future, we decided to slightly change the way we mark the versions for the game updates. Here’s how the version numbers work: 0.3.4.a - changed from 1 to 0. 1 means that it’s a full release and 0 means that it’s in early access. And just in case you were wondering, yes, the game is still in early access. 0.3.4.a - This marks a significant update to the game, such as a release of a new night. Currently, we have 3 nights so the number is 3. 0.3.4.a - This marks a normal update that doesn’t always bring new content. It’s mostly used for updates with big improvements and new features. 0.3.4.a - And this one is used to mark patches and hotfixes.
One more thing… October 31st
For the spookiest day of the year, we will have something special to share on 31st! It won’t be night 4, but it might be something related to it. What is it? Well, the 31st around the corner... ;))
And that’s it for this CT - Thank you so much for reading it! For us, the developers, who are on such a small team, it feels really bad to keep pushing things back. But, on the bright side, it will really help us to reduce our stress and with the extra time we’ll have more time to polish everything and put out an amazing night 4. We really, really appreciate your patience and we’ll continue our hard work to make the wait absolutely worth it! :))
Goodnight.
"Try to Fall Asleep" Community Transmission #2 - September 2020
Good evening players,
Today we're bringing a new Community Transmission (CT) for September of 2020. This time we decided to do a news post on Steam rather than doing a full video simply because as much as we’d like to make a proper video for the CT, we really want to prioritize all of our efforts on developing the 4th night. We’ll still follow the format of the CT, but in a text format. But don’t worry - we still have gifs and we’ll give answers to your questions!
So without afutherado, let’s dive in the CT #2...
Where’s night 4?
I’d like to start with addressing what’s been going on with the development of the game. We assume that the biggest question after the first CT is - you mentioned a release for night 4 in late July, but it’s September now… What gives? In all honesty, we had too high hopes and I was a bit too optimistic about the release of night 4, so we’re sorry for mentioning that date. But on top of that, we were put in some unfortunate circumstances as well. I don’t want to get into too many details with this, but basically there was a huge issue with our income from Steam. Since we didn’t get any income since May, we weren’t able to commission people for work and even worse, we struggled to pay people for the work that had been done. And because of that, most of my team had to take a slight hiatus from the development. The issue wasn’t anything special, bad or illegal - it was just a small detail that needed to be changed, but in order to do that we had to go through a lot of bureaucracy. But as of late August, everything has been resolved, people have been paid, we can commission people again and everything is more or less back to normal.
What’s the progress on night 4?
As far as the development progress on night 4 goes, I’m happy to report that we’ve achieved the minimum viable product, where the core mechanics and gameplay have been made and you can complete night 4 from start to finish. That said, there still are plenty of things that we need to add, such as a few cutscenes, interactables, some spooks, lore pieces and of course, we still need to polish and playtest the whole thing. There are times where we’re working on night 4 and we realise that there are things that could be further improved or things that we should add. For example, to tell the backstory about the RL-95 underground facility, originally we had a very simple, traditional approach, where there would be notes/pages spread across the level that the player would pick up and read their contents. We realised that just reading the notes was kinda boring, so we decided to hire a voice actor who would read out the notes and even add a visual element that reflects what’s being read from the notes. This’ll do justice to the backstory that was written for the underground facility, as it is a story that I really enjoyed writing and am quite proud of. But, things like these will considerably increase the development time. Night 4 is one of our biggest nights in the game and it’s also a big turning point in the story as well. Our goal is to deliver an awesome update with night 4, but in order to do that, we need just a bit more time. However, I don’t feel comfortable putting an estimate on the release, because the last time we did that, we encountered the aforementioned delays and it put a lot of unnecessary pressure on us. Rest assured that everything is going well and night 4 really isn’t that far away. :))
Night 4 Sneak peaks
It wouldn’t be a proper CT if we didn’t bring any sneak peaks of night 4, right? So here are a few gifs of some familiar and brand new locations!
A cinematic at the start of the 4th dream. Where could it possibly be…
Here’s a shot of the improved cave. With some game optimization techniques we were able to make it look better and add more detail to it as well.
A brand new location in the underground facility.
Q&A
This part of the CT is dedicated to answering questions from the community.
Q: What's probably the most time consuming aspect of development? Is it creating models or animations or events or bug fixing or..? (@GoodBoyKaru from Twitter)
A: It always warrys… I don’t think I can narrow it down to just one thing, but I’d say programming, bug fixing and game mechanic creation can take most of our time and they can also be very unpredictable. With bug fixing, it sometimes can get very challenging to find the cause of the bug and once you fix it, you need to make sure you don’t break anything else.
Q: Where did the idea for the game come from? (@!bigchonky from Discord)
A: It came from personal experience. Ironically, I was never a huge fan of horror movies or games. I used to be one of those people who got easily scared. I vividly remember seeing Paranormal Activity for the first time, and to say the least, that movie messed up a whole summer for me. For many nights, I had trouble falling asleep. It always felt that I was never alone in my room - that someone was standing somewhere in the corner, staring at me, waiting for the right moment to do some kind of harm. There was always a feeling that something weird was about to happen and I was super sensitive to any noise - creaking doors, cat steps, wind noise. Somehow falling asleep, becoming unconscious and leaving myself vulnerable to some kind of an unknown entity felt really scary to me. Fast forward to late 2014 and Five nights at Freddy's games were coming out. I played the first one and yet again, I felt terrified, but this time I was more mature and it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was with Paranormal Activity. FNAF brought a brand new concept to the horror game genre where the player was stationary - you couldn't move from your seat, but you still had to somehow deal with the terrifying animatronics. That sense of powerlessness, struggle being glued to one spot kinda resonated with me, and eventually it clicked in my head one day that falling asleep and struggling with your paranoia was equally if not even more terrifying. And then it naturally progressed from that genesis. Eventually, I even grew to love horror, both movies and games!
Q: Do you consider any other horror game to be an inspiration, like FNAF or Bendy and the ink machine? (@DOUBLEW from Discord)
A: Yes, however, I only got into horror games in my late teens. FNAF of course was one of the biggest inspirations, along with Slenderman, Resident Evil VII, P.T. and the Silent Hill franchise and some of the .EXE games. Besides video games, a lot of inspiration for horror came from movies such as The Shining, The Thing, Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring and The Blair Witch Project. Also, while talking about inspirations, I recently read Junji Ito’s UZUMAKI, which also left an impact on me!
Q: Have you guys ever had to scrap an idea/night because it didn't turn out as planned? (@RK-900 from Discord)
A: In the first 3 nights we never really encountered anything like that. For the 4th we had to dial down what we wanted to do with the dream phase a little, because it got a bit too complex. Nonetheless, it's more of a positive than a negative for the 4th dream phase.
Q: Were there any strategies with optimizing the large levels such as the forest? (@PythonViper14 from Discord)
A: Yes, considering the average specs of a gaming PC, optimizing is still very crucial for a good game. We’re not flawless at it, but over time we’ve gained some experience with it. I think there are 3 key factors for optimization - lighting, meshes with materials and scripts. Each of them require its own approach and optimizing techniques. With lighting, you need to consider what lights can be baked and where you need to see shadows. With meshes you want to reduce the amount of polygons as much as possible, while maintaining the graphical fidelity and optimise materials with mipmaps. And with scripts you need to make sure you’re not making any infinite loops or unnecessarily checking/changing a single or multiple values for every frame. It might warry from engine to engine and some projects might be different from others, but the same logic should apply to everything.
And that’s the end of this CT! Thank you very much for reading it through. Night 4 is coming and I can't wait for you all to finally experience it :))
Good night, Martin
"Try to Fall Asleep" Community Transmission #1 - June 2020
[previewyoutube="YtaZ12pbqwk;full"]
Welcome to our very first Community Transmission for "Try to Fall Asleep"! An experimental video format, which we would like to do anytime when we have something interesting to share or want to answer some questions from the community. Let us know if you like these types of videos and if we should continue making them!
A small update from us regarding the current situation in the world.
Good evening,
We had some plans to share more details on the upcoming 4th night of our game this week, but due the current situation in the world, we decided to postpone it to next week. Right now, people who are working towards crucial change need to be heard the most.
All of us at AmberDrop, stand together along side with you against discriminating people of color and unnecessary police brutality.
Stay safe, peaceful, united but don't give into violence. Racism should become a thing of the past.
