I hope the new year finds you all well. Also, welcome to all the newcomers who have joined us since the game got featured. It was a big surprise, and I hope you all enjoy the demo and these updates!

Here are the notable development notes I have for this month.

I've been building out the levels of the Horror movies for the horror nightmare. The first movie has all but one location finished, and the second has about 2/3rds of its locations done as well. Most of the key art and animation is finished. I think I could get everything but the ending done in about a month without crunching myself.

If you didn't see the show and tell from last week, I added parked cars to the suburban areas of the Nightmare.

The Film Effect

I needed some way to let the player know that they were in one of the movies and which movie they were in, just by seeing the screen. So I had to make a film effect.

I wanted the film effect to be subtle. It has a light film grain/noise animation and scratches along the sides. I added some vignetting, and when you can leap out of the movie, there's a filmstrip border that pushes in from the side of the world. Leaping or falling off the edge returns you to the drive-in.

The second thing I did was adjust the way the backgrounds look. 

The first movie has a very rural background with barns and no distant lights. 

The second (zombie) movie has a more suburban feel with distant lights and nasty green fog.

I'm happy with this level of differentiation between the two movies, so I'm going to stop futzing with all this and get the nightmare done. I changed this nightmare probably the most out of any in the game because the first iteration was so weak in the story department.  Originally, it all took place in one big graveyard, and Ed, the Nightmare haver, was simply afraid of death.

I also did some new inventory art and have been considering some UI tweaks, mainly moving the game options to the Y-button key ring menu so it's faster to open.

That's all for now.

 -The Kappawumpus.