Hey Submariners!!

It’s hard to believe, but it’s already been 18 days since we submitted Hello Darkness for Ludum Dare 57 — and the response from all of you has been absolutely incredible. Your feedback, support, and enthusiasm have meant the world to us!

Since then, the team has been hard at work crafting a Post-Jam Version of the game — a version that we believe is truly worthy of your time. Whether you have played it before or are just jumping in, we are incredibly excited to invite you to dive back in and experience what we consider the definitive edition of Hello Darkness.

Below is a comprehensive list of changes for the new update:

• Difficulty curve has been adjusted to extend play time.
• Some environment geo has been modified to balance gameplay.
• Radar Siren range has been doubled so players can hear it from the back of the sub.
• The warning system has been tweaked to be more reliable.
• Impact sounds to the sub's hull are now directional.
• Fixed an issue where the machine failing sound for equipment wasn't firing.
• Water will now appear to pour out of cracked windows.
• Particles have been extensively optimized to improve overall performance.
• Machines will now spark at the first damaged state.
• Directions and inputs now appear when mounting the helm.
• The reticle is less jumpy when switching between indicators.
• The toilet will now be highlighted when holding a full bucket.
• The Wrench and Bucket now play animations when used.
• Water has been modified to stand out better inside the hull.
• The color and scale of some tools have been adjusted to stand out better in darkness.
• Modified the compression of textures to ensure they appear correctly in web build.
• Fixed a bug where the depth zones were not being counted properly.
• Fixed an issue where suffocation audio continued playing after death.

We have done a number of optimizations to help improve the overall experience, more specifically: getting our html build to not crash. Suffice to say, we are confident we have achieved that. That said, even with all the improvements, performance in the HTML version still varies a lot depending on your device and browser. We’re pretty new to developing for web, and this jam has been a huge learning experience for us, and everything we've picked up will definitely help future projects. If you’re playing the HTML version, we highly recommend using Chrome — it seems to run the most consistently there. Honestly, the fact we got it running at all feels like a small miracle, and we’re super proud of how far it’s come! Still, we recommend downloading the .exe for the best experience.

While there’s always more polish and features we could add, we’ve decided that with this latest update, we will be wrapping up development on Hello Darkness. It’s been an amazing journey, and we’re so proud of how far the game has come thanks to all of your feedback and support.

Rest assured, this will not be the end for Tiny Bot. We hope to continue bringing new creative ideas to future jams. In the meantime, we’re shifting our focus back to our previous project, Poppet which has seen massive improvements since our 1.2 update released at the end of October. We're not quite ready to show anything off just yet, but we promise — it’ll be worth the wait. You can expect more updates from us in the coming months!

Thank you again for being part of this journey with us. 💖