UPDATE 0.0.3

Following a few playtests I've seen, I've gathered some insights into what we should change / update. 

Nobody knew why they were getting hurt

They kept asking why they were taking damage, about three times, and I felt it every time. When you got a strike, the game scared you and put a tiny message in the corner of the screen. Nobody reads the corner of the screen when something just jumped at them. So to them it was random damage.

Now when you get a strike, a card comes up in the middle of the screen once the scare is over. It tells you which strike it is, which rule you broke (in the rule's own words) and what you actually did. That rule then gets circled in red pen on the sheet, and if you get fired, the receipt lists every strike and the rule behind it. Dying should teach you something.

The rules sheet

The rules were there the whole time, taped by the till, and almost nobody read them until they'd already failed. Fair, really. It's a sheet of text in a horror game, and you've got a customer waiting.

So the sheet now opens by itself at the start of every night, and you can't start until you've put it down. From Night 2 it's split into the rules you already know and a red NEW TONIGHT section, and every rule starts with a short bold tag so you can find it quickly. I've also spread the rules out more evenly. Night 3 was asking you to learn too much at once, so a couple of them now arrive a night later.

Too many voices

Some playtesters' verdict was that there was too much going on, and they put most of it down to the text-to-speech voices. Yeah. It's a game where everyone talks in a robot voice, and I'd let them all talk at once.

Now only one voice talks at a time. The small talk, the goodbyes and the booth butting in on later nights all wait for the person speaking to finish. There's no small talk at all on Night 1, and less of it on Night 2, so you get a chance to learn the job first. The hint to press R and hear an order again now turns up after 5 seconds instead of 14.

The quiet voices under the main ones, the ones you aren't meant to be sure you heard, are much quieter now and each one sits hard in one ear. Headphones recommended. Spooky, yes. Loud, no.

Smaller things

• A few ordinary customers said "hi again" when they'd never been in before, and then I had a rule about cars that come back. That was me confusing my own player. Those lines are gone, and the plate is now printed on the till so you don't have to turn round to check it against the log.
• If you click something and nothing happens, the game now tells you why, in red, right under your crosshair ("THEY ARE STILL TALKING", "THE CAR ISN'T AT THE WINDOW YET"). Before, it just did nothing, which is the worst thing a button can do.
• The game now tells you it's "NIGHT 1 OF 5". Playtesters asked how long it goes on for. Fair question.

What next

I don't know yet if Night 3 is in the right place. If you play it, I'd love to hear where you got stuck, what you misread and what you took for a bug. The best feedback so far has come from watching people get confused, so please don't be polite about it.

0.0.3 is up now. Please pull forward.

No Call Studios :)