Hey everyone!

You might be surprised, but I decided to update the public build of A Home in Darkness.

While this is technically the version 0.9, it is NOT the kind of 0.9 version I wanted to release initially. As I posted in my last two updates, 0.9 was supposed to be a fully playable demo-like version of the game. And because we didn’t reach the goal of the itch campaign, I didn’t intend to release anything during July.

However after careful thinking, I found a better solution.

This game is available as an early access title. But I never really embraced the „access“ part of it.

So instead of doing large very infrequent updates, I instead want to do small updates frequently. I’m talking about a time-frame of roughly every month.

I think this is a much better solution for everyone who bought the game already, or supported me during the campaign. But of course this also means:

• What you can play will probably have bugs
• Game look and feel might change a lot because of placeholder art / early feature implementation
• You don’t have playable „content“, instead just a big test area for ideas

Especially the last point is important! Content is the most time consuming part of 3D game development. And I can test most features easier if I have just a test area.

Still, at some point this year I want to start working on the real game content (Story, Player Tasks, Game Events).

Now let’s talk about what you can do in this version of 0.9:

Essentially this is a combat demo. A short while after you start the game, you’ll hear a laughing sound. At that point, enemies spawn in. You can either use your knife, gun or rituals to defeat them. Rituals work on contact for both you and your enemies. So the poison ritual can infect you, while the healing ritual can heal enemies as well. For now, this is intended behavior, as rituals are very powerful. I want them to have some kind of high risk / high reward aspect.

Aside from killing enemies, there isn’t really anything else you can do. The area you play in will eventually turn into the full town the game takes place in. But for now it’s just a grey box level.

The combat has more to it than you might notice. It includes a form of staggering /stunning the enemy after hitting them, as well as bleeding and critical hits. So feature wise the combat system is already working as intended. I „just“ need to add more unique enemy types that require special strategies to beat.

To attack the enemy, you have two attack modes in melee combat. In ranged combat you need to hold aim and then shoot. I’ll add some form of tutorial for this in the final game, but right now my focus lies with other things. Default configuration for attack  is [ctrl] and [e].

Thanks for reading all this. Have fun with the updated version of the game and until next time, bye bye.