Friday Update 01/17/20

A new beta build is in the works, however it may be a few hours past midnight when it's ready to be built and shipped. I just need to make sure the photos and posters work with the new difficulty system. I'll update this post once it's ready.

Update 1: Sorry for the lack of a beta build, I found several issues with the new system that will require me to rewrite the script for the photos and posters and change how they're activated each night.

I spent this week overhauling the system that sets up each night, as well as the difficulty of each night. This is all changes on the back end, although there will likely be a noticeable change to difficulty. I'll need to balance the new values to make sure the game hasn't become frustrating.

Previously, difficulty was handled by assigning individual values to AI functions. For example Fredrika's "Difficulty level" was determined by A. when she "woke up" B. How many actions she made/hour and C. her movement speed. This old way allowed more control over exactly how the AI's behaved, but it became difficult in the new back end "modular nights" system to have to define these values for 6 bots across multiple nights.

Difficulty has been reworked so that it has one defining "Difficulty Value" variable. This number is on a scale from 0-1, where 0 is easier than the old "Easy" difficulty and 1 is harder than the old "Nightmare" difficulty. In the new system "Easy" has a value of 0.2, Normal has a value of 0.4, Hard 0.6, and Nightmare 0.8. The Halloween event's difficulty has been dubbed internally as "Hell" difficulty and is 0.9. Posters increase the difficulty by 0.1 and photos decrease it by 0.1, so that a full set of posters on "Hell" difficulty becomes the highest level of difficulty the game has to offer.

Some nights will have "Special Difficulty" levels with some bots being more or less active. For example if I do an "Easter Bonnie" event I would be able to make Bonnie extremely active for the event while the other bots behave as normal.