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.

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.

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!



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.


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.
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.

Yes, FINALLY! :’)) (Available through the settings menu)


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.


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.




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.

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.

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.


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.


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.

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.

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...


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.



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. :))


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.




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

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!

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.

Say hi to OSORE, your next new nightmare and threat in the upcoming 4th night.

Good evening players,

Today we're thrilled to announce that a super great feature is finally coming to the game! Our mission is to create a truly amazing game, and although our work has been already embraced by so many people, we felt like something was still missing... Something that would bring the game to the next level, something that people would fall in love with in and something that would change the gaming industry forever. This feature is so amazing, that it deserves its own edition of the game.

And this new, truly amazing new feature is...


That's right! Snoring has FINALLY been made possible in our "Try to Fall Asleep" game. This is an amazing day in our lives and our team is so proud of it :'))

When you're trying to fall asleep, now you can press "S" on your keyboard while your eyes are closed and you'll be able to snore in the game!

Normally, such a wonderful feature would be sold for 20$ as a DLC. Some might even go for 60$ as it is that groundbreaking. But we are doing things differently...


We can not wait for people to get their hands on the new editon of the game. It's going to be amazing!





P.S. April fools ;))

Good evening,

Today we're releasing a nice update for the game. It comes with a lot of fixes, improvements and minor performance improvements. To clarify, this update does not include the 4th night. That'll be coming in the next major 1.4 update that's due to release sometime in the future.

Until then, lets see what this update has to offer!

• Minor lighting improvements.
  
• Minor performance improvements.

As a part of this new update, we're implementing a smooth feature for the flashlight. Basically, the flashlight's movement won't we identical to the player's camera movement, but it will drag along as the player looks around. In addition to this, we've improved the color and brightness of the flashlight which improves readability and adds more realism.

• Eliminated a scenario when the player could get stuck in the wall of the "Close the doors" minigame.
  
• Increased the amount of doors needed to be opened to win the "Close the doors" minigame by one.
  
• Improved the overall performance in the minigames.
  
• Visually improved the "Flee to the Exit" minigmaes.

• Added missing collision detection for the chairs under the Revivel sign in the main lobby, for the chair at the desk and poles.
  
• Added an instructive message for going the wrong way in the lab's hallways.
  
• Added blood and better sound effects for the ending scene.
  
• Adjusted lighting in the main lobby.

• Fixed a bug which would allow the player to play the audio recorder, multiple times in a row.
  
• Slightly adjusted the placement of the UV signs.
  
• Fixed an emission property for a lamp without a light source.
  
• Adjusted mouse sensitivity.
  
• When player spots BURT for the first time, there is a system that will make sure that the border of the window won't obstract the view.
  
• Improved the teaser for the next night when completing the 3rd night.

That's it for today folks! At the moment, we don't have anything more to share about night 4 yet. When the right time will come, we'll be sure to share the new info with you first! There is still a lot of work for us to do. And if you haven't already, be sure to check out the teaser for the 4th night!

Goodnight

The Pinetree island has had a huge secret, decaying for years in the dark. Are you ready to discover it? Here's a small teaser for the 4th night...

Night 4, particularly the 4th dreaming sequence, is shaping up to be one of the biggest additions to the game. As we learn on the surface, that going underground is necessary, after years of decay the darkest secret of the island is waiting to be rediscovered. Venture into the dark corridors of the old rotten underground lab, restore power and find what you are looking for. But remember, nightmares are never easy. You might find yourself in unexpected scenarios. And be aware, someone new might be listening in the darkness...