Demo update 0.4.0: madness, a smarter hunter, and two weeks of playtests

The demo has changed a lot since it first went up. Two weeks of playtests, your reports and a lot of late nights later, here is everything that is new. Thank you for being here for the Next Fest.

Madness

• You can see it coming: from half sanity, the picture darkens, loses its colours, and its edges wobble and trail, with a heartbeat that quickens as you slip.
• Whispers only you can hear join in on the edge of madness.
• Muffled hearing: the world, and your teammates' voices, fade away. Once mad, nothing they say is understandable.
• A breaking voice: your team hears your voice go muffled, choppy, then almost demonic once you are gone. The dead hear it too.
• Slap them back: 3 to 4 slaps bring a teammate back from madness, and you come back at 35% sanity, safe for 5 seconds.

What haunts the house

• Between hunts, something walks the house unseen and follows the most shaken agent. Talking, loud noises and the tablet draw it to you. A photo catches its blurred trace, and doors may slowly open by themselves.
• Nowhere out of reach: perched on a car roof, it throws its weapon at you. On a bed or a table, it pulls you down. Running in circles around a fence no longer works.
• It picks its target: whoever slaps it or hits it with a thrown item, whoever it sees much closer, or whoever makes noise right beside it.
• New scares: knocks behind a closed door and at a window, a figure staring from behind the glass or walking past it, and a sting when you actually see a scare.
• A new look: its body wears away at the edges, sheds black ash and leaves afterimages when it moves.
• It opens a closet slowly, with a creak, before taking the one hiding inside, and no longer kills through closed doors. Hunts never start on top of the players.

Agents and the team

• Pick your agent in the lobby among several skins, with their own outfits, faces, hairstyles and hair colours. Your choice follows you everywhere, ghost included.
• Roles have perks: twice the stamina, a steadier mind in the dark, a cheaper ritual book, resistance to corrupted objects. Each agent sees their role in large type on arrival.
• Hands that hold things: fingers close on the real shape of what you carry, heavy items take both hands, and valuables sit right in the hand.
• Ghosts see in full darkness, carry and drop items like the living, and can zoom.
• Three new people to meet on cases, and new prior statements in every case file.

Playing together

• Steam invites: accept a friend's invite from the overlay or your friends list, even with the game closed.
• Late join: crashed out of a mission? Rejoin it from an invite, with your role, as a ghost if you had died.
• Session password, optional, set when hosting.
• Push to talk works in the lobby and shows a microphone icon.

The office

• Three save slots, the divisions: funds, depot, equipment, corrupted objects and your last 100 missions, per division.
• The shop works with a cart, and a SELL tab sells your equipment and the corrupted objects you brought back.
• ARCHIVE on the office terminal lists every mission of the division with its full statement.
• The end of mission statement reveals what the claim really was, GENUINE or FRAUD and how, and whether your decision was right. A Flawless report bonus rewards a perfect file.
• Your role badge and case file stay in a corner of the screen at the office, and computers show their role from across the room.
• One to three cases each time you come back.

On the case

• Photo album (P): every photo of the session, mission by mission, with the room, the time and who took it.
• The M.O.I. Field Agent Handbook (H): new pages come in as you discover things.
• The supernatural evidence annex of the claim form now pays for every object judged right or documented on film.
• The EMF reader crackles in bursts near the presence, and the room where the claim started keeps a constant peak.
• Corrupted items get a faint double drifting around them. A haunted stereo joins the radio, telephone and TV.
• The large suburban house gets its light switches, acoustics, ambience and new lamps, and dust floats in every room.
• Fresh flashlight batteries in the car trunk.

Sound

• New sounds for the car trunk, doors flung open, glass bottles, holy water, slaps, impacts on walls and floors, and your clothes when you swap items.
• The house ambience no longer clicks.

Quality of life

• Shaders compile at launch, for fewer hitches the first time you enter a room.
• A welcome memo at launch, a headset recommendation and a photosensitivity warning.
• Settings: a Game tab, a mute option when the game is in the background, Apply saves and Back cancels, settings open from the lobby, menus fit 4:3 screens.
• Escape closes what you are in before opening the pause menu.
• Key hints for every tool in hand.
• The credits now thank our Discord's Founding Agents.

Fixes

• Over a hundred fixes from our playtests and your reports, among them:
• Items no longer jump in your hand, blink out while running, stick out of furniture, get picked up through walls, or fly into the car or the sky.
• The tablet no longer shows READ ERROR, and its index and progress count right.
• Hair no longer stretches, vanishes or turns blond.
• The HUD comes back after madness, and the office computer no longer traps your view or cursor.
• Long names no longer overlap on the form, the tablet, the lobby or the statement.
• You no longer get stuck on bushes, and the hunter no longer gets stuck in the basement or out of the map.
• The camera flash fires at once, and photos are no longer grainy.
• The end of mission statement no longer reopens on every purchase, and no role is lost on the way to a mission.

Found something odd? The in-game Report a bug button sends it straight to us with your log, or come and tell us on Discord: https://discord.gg/FQUbwY7ShW

See you on the next claim, The Sillage Studio team