Good evening players,

This is Martin on behalf of the AmberDrop team.

First of all, allow me to wish everyone a happy new year! 2024 has been a very difficult year for many, but we hope that with 2025, things will start to move towards some better things and calmer climates.

The outgoing year was particularly difficult for me, as I had to pick up a full time job in a big, complicated company to make ends meet and raise funds for the completion of TTFA. Although this was the right move financially, it dramatically influenced my ability to work on the game, especially in the first half of the year when I had to get used to my new job. At that time, whenever I found the time to get some progress done for the game, I was always in a state of near complete physical and mental exhaustion. Thankfully, it wasn't all for nothing, and so far I've been able to secure a financial future for the game (to keep its development going) and through these difficulties, I was able to grow and learn a lot about myself and about life in general. There's a popular Latvian saying "one grows through difficulties", which perfectly sums up the past year for me.

That said, I'd like to share my deepest gratitude to everyone, who has been understanding, supportive and most importantly patient during this very difficult period. No matter how small your comment or support may be, it makes us feel like all of this is worthwhile and we're not just putting all our work into a black void. On behalf of all of us - thank you!

In general, things have been improving and moving in a good direction. Lately, I've been more successful at finding more free-quality time for working on the game.

All of this positive movement has brought us here to discuss our plans for 2025...

Since we have made a lot of good progress in the past few weeks, we now feel comfortable and confident in setting a goal for ourselves to release the full version of the game at the 4th quarter of this year!



Currently, we're well into the production of the 6th night, and its levels/scenes (not including gameplay, animation and voiceovers) are about 2/3rds complete! In the upcoming months we'll start to work on the voiceover and animations, which will push the game further to completion. Of course, once the right time comes, there will be a more precise release for the full release and some trailers/teasers along the way. ;))

I've been working on this game since the tail end of 2014, so this is basically the 10th year of the games development. As you can imagine, it makes me feel really, really happy (and a bit anxious) to finally see the game's full release on the horizon(after all, it's been 10 years!). However, there's still some way to go, so in the upcoming months, we'll be laser focused on finishing the game till the end of 2025. During this time, if our online engagement seems slightly low, rest assured that we're very busy on finishing the game.

From all of us here, thank you for supporting this wild dream of ours, and we look forward in experiencing the full release together at the end of this year ;))

Sincerely,
Martin (on behalf of the AD team)

Good evening,

Tonight we're releasing a small patch to the game. Here's what's included:

• Fixed an issue with the settings menus which caused crashes for some players. If crashes still persist, please refer to the "SUPPORT THREAD" and follow the bottom 2 troubleshooting methods.
  
• Fixed a glitch where after the hiding phase the player would still hear John's breathing.
  
• Fixed some rendering issues for the 3rd dream's jumpscare.
  
• Adjusted the position of some UV sign in the 3rd dream.
  
• Remixed some of the monster sounds in the 4th dream and added a "notice sound" whenever the player enters the monsters hearing range.
  
• Improving the AI stability for the monsters.

And that's it for this patch! If you find anything else or have some other suggestions/feedback, feel free to share them it in the "General feedback thread".

Good night!

AD team

Good evening players,

Tonight we're releasing a new update for "Try to Fall Asleep"! For more details, here are the release notes for update 0.4.2...

Once you complete all 4 nights, you'll unlock a new "EXTRAS" menu.


In this new Extras menu, you can access the "TAPE ARCHIVE", which contains the 3 LUC1D tapes as well as the supercut of the Okarell notes from Night 4. More options for the Extras menu will be added later down the road.

Additionally, we added a new option in the settings menu to set the FPS target for the game. This will allow to limit the performance of the game for cases where the game was draining too much performance on the running PC.

• Updated lighting and adjusted jumpscare animations for all monsters. Now they are more menacing and will look better as hallucinations.
  
  
• Completely remade the blanket model and added some cloth physics. Check out how it moves!
  
  
• Added a cooldown timer for events that occur when the player opens his eyes. This will hugely improve the difficulty balance for the later nights.

• Increased the text size for subtitles.
  
• Small map adjustments and added detail in the main lab building.
  
• In the 4th dream, improved the monster sound mixing, so it becomes clearer where the monster is at any given time. Additionally, monsters will react to your footsteps sounds rather than on your movement.
  
• In the 4th dream, improved the ground detail.

The new location for the falling asleep segments is close to being finished. It still needs a few polishes here and there, but after those are sorted out, we will start to work on some new crazy spooky hallucinations.


For the dreaming segments - we still need to conduct a few playtests to adjust a few values for the 5th night, but in terms of gameplay, night 5 is playable from start to finish. What's left to add are 2 cutscenes, some minor sound mixing adjustments and all voice acting, which still needs to be recorded and implemented in the 5th night.

Night 6 is also well into production. We've basically finalized the progression and main contents of the 6th night, many scenes/levels have moving past the "greybox" phase and are in the process of being fully realized. The 6th night is shaping up to be one hell of a night!

Regarding an approximate release date - we're not ready to provide any dates yet, because there are still too many factors which could sway the dates one or the other way around. The least we can say is that we are aiming to finish this game in the upcoming year. Once we can get the 6th night to a state where it can be played from start to finish, we'll be able to give realistic estimates for the full release.


And that's it for this update! If you find anything else or have some other suggestions/feedback, feel free to share them it in the "General feedback thread".

Good night!

AD team

Good evening,

We're back from the break, and to celebrate the 10th community update, we decided to throw together a cool livestream! We did a a cool retrospective of the game, share future plans, as well as have a few sneak peeks of what's to come. Accompanying Martin was Jorge, the lead programmer for the game, as well as Will, the main character/monster modeler, who joined us in the middle of the stream.
For those who couldn't join the livestream when it was live, here's a link to the stream's recording:


Here's a quick recap of the stream...

After doing the 2nd Kickstarter, we decided to take a small break and reassess the whole situation with the game. Additionally during this time, Martin was hired as a a full time employee in a respectable company. Although his job will require a lot of attendance, he'll still be able to dedicate plenty of his free time to the game and turn it back into a hobby project. Also, thanks to his new job, he'll be able to put in more of his personal funds into the game's budget to reach more of its potential.

Development for the last 2 night now continues in full motion. We've reassessed the whole scope of the game and some levels are already underway in development. Although there is no roadmap for releasing the last two nights, the team will not rush it and give it the proper time to create a satisfying conclusion to the game and its story.

During the stream, the team showed a few small sneak peeks of the next night...




Now that we're recuperated and figured out various things regarding the development, we're supper exited to continue our work on the game and deliver and awesome finale to the game. Although it will still take some time, we hope you stick around, because the journey to the finish line will still be interesting to follow.

On behalf of the AmberDrop team, thank you for your support and we wish you a good night :))

AD

Good evening players,

Tonight we're releasing a small, new patch for "Try to Fall Asleep"! For more details, here are the patch notes...

• In dream 2 and 4, added a new path that leads to the watchtower. The light trail on the 4th dream has also been updated.

• Reduced the shadow scare spawn regularity.

• If you're pulling up the notepad while sneaking, you'll do it silently and the monsters won't notice you. This also works for picking radio parts and Michael's pages.
  
• Improved the stability for the notepad's camera transitions.
  
• Improved the collision while running up the tunnel to the surface.

• Updated texts for the popup in the main menu and for the end game message.

And that's it for this patch! If you find anything else or have some other suggestions/feedback, feel free to share them it in the "General feedback thread".

Good night!

AD team

Hello everyone,

This is Martin, the creator of Try to Fall Asleep. I wanted to give you guys a brief update on everything regarding the Kickstarter campaign as well as share some short and long-term plans for the game.

So, let's just jump in and start with Kickstarter.


First off all, I wanted to thank each and everyone one of you who pledged their support to the campaign. Even though we weren’t able to reach the goal, I’m still very grateful for the support that you guys were ready to give for the game. The humbling messages and comments that we received along the way were really motivating too, so thank you for those as well.

Overall, I think we had a pretty good run, but unfortunately it just didn’t pan out the way we hoped it would. I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing and reviewing the campaign, what we could've done better and so on. In short though, looking at the Kickstarter’s statistics, I believe we had a pretty good conversion rate and only one of the 39 supporters canceled their pledge. Basically, the campaign itself was doing its job really well, but we just couldn't get enough traction to our page in order to make it succeed.


On November 8th I plan to host a presentation about the overall journey of the game as well as take a deep dive into our Kickstarter. So if it sounds interesting to you, we invite you to tune in to Latvia’s Game Developer Association YouTube channel, where they will be livestreaming my presentation live. You'll also get a chance to ask me some questions live.

So overall, even though we didn’t reach our goal, I’m still glad that we were able to give it a good shot and try out some really cool ideas. On the bright side, this campaign was able to do much better than the first one (: And of course, this still was a great learning experience and we'll be able to share our knowledge with other indie developers on November 8th.

So, what are our short and long term plans?

First of all, we’d like to make the physical items from our Kickstarter available outside of the campaign. We still need to figure out the best way to do it, as there are some logistics that need to be sorted out in order to make it happen. I’m not ready to give any concrete dates yet, but we do hope to make it happen around the end of this October. So if you really liked our physical items from the campaign, we’ll try to figure out how to make them available as soon as we can, so stay tuned for further updates on that.



As for the game - we plan to launch one more patch tomorrow with some nice fixes, adjustments and overall improvements.

It took a lot of effort to make the Kickstarter happen - the page itself, the LUC1D livestreams, all the physical items and rewards, logistics and marketing etc. We even were releasing patches for the game along with conducting the Kickstarter as well. It all has been putting a lot of stress, strain and pressure on me and my team for the past few months. So, till the end of this year, we would really like to take a bit of a break.

The break will give us some time to rest, reflect on our journey, recuperate and head into the new year refreshed and ready to continue our work on the game. It will also give us some much needed time to thoroughly rethink our strategy and re-evaluate our plans for the last 2 nights.

Of course, the biggest challenge is going to be the game’s development budget.

Without the extra funding that Kickstarter would’ve provided to the game, we’ll need to downscale a few things and find the right compromises, so that we can fit in our budget and still deliver a great closure for the game and its story.

I personally will be getting an extra job somewhere in the project management realm. I'll be able to dedicate some portion of my salary to the game’s budget if necessary. And IF we set up a permanent store for the Kickstarter items, that'll be another potential way to support the budget of the game.

And as to when we could expect to see the full release - unfortunately, I don't have the answers for that at the moment. Once we've had our break and had some time to rethink things, we hope to have a better estimate in the new year.

Even though things didn't work out with the Kickstarter, it's not gonna stop us from finishing the game. We've come so far that it would be just stupid to give up right now... So we won't - we'll find a way to move forward, towards the completion of our game. Some compromises will need to be made, but we'll make sure that we release a damn good game for the full release. We hope to see you around when that happens. Until then, thank you for your support and stay tuned for news from us in the future :))

Sincerely,

Martin

[[url=https://twitter.com/AmberDropGames]TWITTER/X[/url]] ~ [[url=https://www.youtube.com/@AmberDrop]YOUTUBE[/url]] ~ [[url=https://discord.gg/uz5WkNN]DISCORD[/url]] ~ [[url=https://amberdropgames.com]WEBSITE[/url]]

Good evening players,

Tonight we're releasing an important, new patch for "Try to Fall Asleep"! For more details, here are the patch notes...

• After muting AB, the monster hallucinations will occur faster.
  
• Adjusted Murgs window jumping animation.

• In dream 2, adjusted texts for some of interactable objects.
  
• In dream 2, added another map near the Holliday Stage.
  
• In dream 3, fixed a bug that would let you skip the hiding phase.
  
• In dream 4, made the notepad system more stable.
  
• In dream 4, slightly lowered the monster hearing sensitivity when getting almost all the radio parts.

And that's it for this patch! If you find anything else or have some other suggestions/feedback, feel free to share them it in the "General feedback thread".

Good night!

AD team

Good evening everyone!

This Tuesday we successfully launched our Kickstarter campaign for the completion of "Try to Fall Asleep". In the first 3 days, our campaign has reached 11% of our funding goal! To those who have already pledged their support to the campaign - thank you, our team's truly grateful for your support.

And to those who had already bought the game on Steam - we thank to you as well. Without your original purchase of this game on Steam, we wouldn't have been able to get this far, release 2 awesome nights and raise the bar for the whole project. You guys are the real MVPs, and you've already have helped us a lot.

If you feel like our game is worthy of your further support, then we invite you to check out our Kickstarter! This is the first time that we've ever done any physical merch, so if you've always wanted to have some kind of a physical memorabilia of our game - now's you chance! You can get the cheapest 1$ pledge and add any of our physical items that we offer in our Kickstarter. But again, you've already helped us a lot by your purchase of the game on Steam, so it's your free choice.



But if pledging funds to the Kickstarter isn't your thing, but you'd still like to help out in some small way - you can help us by spreading the word about our work and the Kickstarter. A simple, friendly share of our game would be a huge help in spreading awareness about our efforts.

So that's it form me for now! Once again, thank you everyone for being on this amazing journey with us, and we hope you look forward to where the ride will take us next.

Sincerely,
Martin

Good evening players,

Tonight we're releasing an important, new patch for "Try to Fall Asleep"! For more details, here are the patch notes...

• Added checkpoint indicators for the 3rd and 4th dream segments.
  
• Increased the light radius for the flashlight in all dreams.

• Fixed a spelling error in a minigame's UI graphic.

• In 3rd dream, added a subtle panting sound when the player is hiding in a hiding spot.
  
• Improved some textures in the 3rd dream.

• Improved footstep sounds when walking on metal.
  
• Fixed a critical issue where the player wouldn't be able to click on doors when escaping to the surface.
  
• Added subtle valve rattling sounds when entering the water room.
  
• Added a keycard which can unlock 2 doors. The key card can be found at the end of the water room.
  
• The water room minigame will now trigger when the player goes back to the main hall.
  
• Adjusted the placement for some radio parts and Michael’s pages.

And that's it for this patch! If you find anything else or have some other suggestions/feedback, feel free to share them it in the "General feedback thread".

Good night!

AD team

Good evening players,

Tonight we're releasing a nice, new patch for "Try to Fall Asleep"! For more details, here are the patch notes...

• Fixed an audio initialization issue where the game's sound would be turned down to 0 when booting up the game for the first time.

• Made the sleep and stress levels move slightly faster in all nights.
  
• Once the stress level raises to 80% and beyond, you won't be able to raise your sleep level. This will be signaled on the info panel with a dimmed down sleep bar. If you take a sleeping pill, you can bypass this limitation as well as enjoy a faster raising sleep level.
  
• If you get jumpscared when the pills are in effect, you will loose 12% of your sleep level.

• Fixed door occlusion issues on the 1st dream.
  
• Improved the look of glass in the 1st dream.
  
• Reduced the interaction distance with items/objects in all dreams by 60%.
  
• Minor performance improvements in the 1st dream.

And that's it for this patch! If you find anything else or have some other suggestions/feedback, feel free to share them it in the "General feedback thread".

Good night!

AD team