Hello and welcome to the final Devlog of "The Backrooms"!

With our last week of Polish Sprint concluded, we are ready to release the game on Tuesday, 11th May! 
We are eager to present you the final result - in the following days, we will update the itch.io page with a Gameplay Trailer, Screenshots and a new Design!

Here is a small sneak-peak of the gameplay:

(messages in the top left are only for us for debug-purposes, they obviously won't be in the final build :))

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But what did we do in the final week before the Release?

Interface

You might remember the last state of the main menu, if not - understandable - it wasn't too interesting. That's why we decided to change it! Our initial plan was to add dropping slime in the background, but when we were starting to work on it, we realised that reaching a satisfying result for the animation would take way to long - and there is a better option!

That's why we chose to turn our 2D-Menu-Screen into 3D and create a small environment with the assets which we already made for the environment anyways.

To make this 3D Menu-Screen work, we also had to adjust some things programming-wise:
Previously, the game was just paused during the Main Menu, but since there are animations playing now, pausing the game won't work. That again means, that you could theoretically move around in the menu screen level, which we obviously don't want. So we had to create a new Game Mode specifically for the Menu Screen, so that animations are playing, but the player can't walk around, but can still activate the Buttons (with mouse or controller).

Another small addition to the Interface are the most import controls. We added them to the ability icons in the bottom of the HUD, so that it would be obvious for the player, that they don't have to click on them, but just press a button to activate the skill. 

The awesome thing is : They switch depending on the last input! :D
So if you are using your mouse and keyboard, you will see the mouse and keyboard controls, but if you are using a controller, you will see the controller buttons!

Assets

As we announced in the last week, we wanted to create a few more assets to decorate the environment. Especially the walls still lacked in variety, so we decided to create Assets, which we can put on there.

You might already now these ones from the menu screen - some eye-catching picture frames and a slightly glowing emergency exit sign:

We also made this slightly bigger prop - a wall-shelf with some smaller assets on it:

During playtesting, we realised that it might not be instantly clear that the player can just walk through the phasable wall, once it's activated. That's why we chose to rework the material of the phaseable wall and make it a transluscent as you can see in the following image:

We also added this "glitch-effect" to it, which has some similarities to the chromatic abberation, that can be visible on the screen, when you are close to starving (=bloodmeter nearly empty).


Apart from these visual changes, we also did some work which you cannot really see. For example channelpacking some textures for optimisation, polishing some sound effects (e.g. different sounds for the attack, so that it won't sound the same all the time) and fixing small issues with the NPC behaviour or attacks of the Protagonist.

If you want to get a good impression of the game, feel free to try it yourself! If you don't want to wait for the release on Tuesday, the 11th May - we still have the previous versions which you can already play, though I can only recommend you to give the final version a try, because it will have some great improvements!

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This is a great point to thank everyone, who has already played the game and provided us with feedback!

Special thanks to BetaHunter, who was following the game-development-progress from the beginning and kept uploading Showcases on his YouTube Channel! 

Thanks so much for your support!

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Please, feel free to leave comments if you should have any feedback or questions - we're happy to help!

See you in The Backrooms! ;)