Ok, i was supposed to post the following part about pre-production, but i'm too busy with the 1.1.2 update which is supposed to be released this friday, so in the meantime i'm gonna make a shorter post about the current WIP, (i'll post about pre-production the next week).
Aside the Adventure mode i mentioned elsewhere on Itch, probably the Discord and Reddit, i'm dealing with several UI/UX polishing and improvements, the one on the screen is a feature that allows to not getting stuck among darkness, at night.
So the feature is a sort of emergency time shift forward, the day/night time will immediately arrive to dawn, in this way night will fade, along whose eyes and jaws which lurk among darkness... but at the price of a life.
Well, without context it seems a bit weird, if not uncovenient as feature, let's say 50% yes and 50% no. I didn't provide extra details in other places i posted, but here in the devlog i have the chance to elaborate further:
1 - Why shifting from night to day? There are several rules about this world of darkness: it's not just about making disappear those creepy dark beings, mostly they revolve around The Hand. This being can destroy your path and it will turn into darkness. It is possible to attempt traveling along darkness, in worldmap but aside being very dangerous, you can do that only during day, in fact if night comes while you're in darkness then The Hand will catch you immediately. If it's already night you won't be able to interact with tiles of darkness;
2 - Why shifting instead of waiting? You can just wait, or doing something else meanwhile... or you can rest in a Safe Spot to also make day/night time shift forward of 6 hours, yet sometimes if darkness destruction surrounds you, you might be locked and isolated from the rest of the world, until dawn comes, and that's why your movement choices in worldmap are extremely important, during a run. Waiting several minutes (up to a max of 15) might not be exactly entertaining, so i added an option to skip that part;
3 - Why a penality? Without a penality, it would be a trick, an exploit and speedrunning tool that basically allows to skip night and that's not something i'd want to make happen, let alone skipping darkness: the path wouln't even be hindered in such case and the core gimmick would crumble;
4 - Life penality, too harsh? Not exactly, Abyss Upgrades allow to boost your starting run amount of lives, you start with more than one and, while losing the last life will make The Hand to suddenly attempt to grab you, losing a life this way won't make The Hand come out. You can even free yourself from the grab attempt if you're strong enough to handle the fight. Your lives can reach a negative value, in that case the following battles against The Hand will become harder to endure, so the Time Penality will shorten this process, if used several times;
5 - Flash Step penality, too harsh? Nope, Flash Step is an emergency button for escape almost from anything, darkness included, it's supposed to recharge at dawn, but not in this case, otherwise that would open to almost endless travelling along paths of darkness.
In the end, the Time Penality feature is only supposed to allow a fast transition in points of the run that would otherwise make the player get stuck temporally, not a way to escape from a bad scenario: if you got surrounded by darkness, you'll still have to venture through darkness when dawn will come.
If you just want to use the feature to skip time, then your lives will be the currency for that.
See us when the next update and devlog page will come!