Sleepy Little Guys

Hello and welcome to another Dave.EXE progress report. Today we're gonna briefly go over what I've recently been working on, while trying not to spoil too much of what's coming!

First, let's start off with the Glorguards. We love em', we hate em'. They've been in a decently good spot for awhile, but have been rather annoying to deal with on some maps. You know the deal, ones where they guard the vending machine so well that there's no real way to get around them without disturbing them. To fix this, we've now implemented a sleep mechanic. Every 10-20 seconds, they'll fall sleep for 12-15 seconds, allowing you to sneak past them and do the vending machine they're staring directly at without getting caught. This change has made them much more tolerable to deal with. While somewhat removing the puzzle aspect to them, it's a more consistent change to make them the type of enemies you're meant to stealth around, using the environment to sneak past and waiting till they fall asleep to go for the vending machine.

Moving onto other topics, I've gone back and redesigned certain areas of the game that had some dead ends or long hallways. These were such a pain with certain enemies, such as the Cutlery. You run out of options and have no way of countering them. So I went back to a few maps and added extra crawlspaces and even a new hallway with a crawlspace that cuts through the middle to Johnny's Junction. Makes it much easier to evade crowds of enemies blocking the hallway!

Some vending machines have also been slightly moved around and extra objects have been added to a few maps in Bear County and Dracula's Castle to make them more fair to play on against certain enemies.

A very welcome addition that's coming this update is the Alert status effect getting a warning icon when you're close to being heard by an enemy who can hear you, such as Lumi, Friend and Thompson. A special sound effect plays when this icon appears to help give the player a heads up. All status effects have now been given a little blip animation to catch your eye when something has appeared on your status effects tab.

There's so much more coming this update, many quality of life changes and additions that'll help players new and old get by. Wish I could share more, but this will be all for now. Thank you for reading and I'll see you in the timelines!