Hello, all you vampire killers.

Changes:

-The "war timer" is turned off when playing on Easy.
-Fixed some bugs when the vampires "grab" the player. There were some issues when multiple vampires would grab the player at the same time and the player animations would glitch out.
-Bug where the Bats would not catch on fire if they walked over campfires that were on fire.
-Bug where the crossbow would show fire even if it had no arrows
-Bug, green poison ghouls would bug out when shot with the turret.

Status of Early Access

Right now I have Night Gate being reviewed by Microsoft for an Xbox port. If I can't get it ported I will release it for Steam sooner rather than later. If it does get the ok for the port, the game will release on both Steam and Xbox at the same time.

If MS does give it the green light, it normally takes about a month or two to do the port give or take. The actual technical part of porting isn't too bad, but it has to go through a series of reviews and quality checks at Microsoft, which they are notorious for.

Overall I feel the game is in a really good place. I will continue to make small tweaks based on feedback and polish the game in the meantime and keep doing posts.

As we approach the end of Early Access, just some reflecting on my first game of this genre.

What worked

The tone of the game, I really feel I hit the tone I was going for. I wanted this kind of Post-Post-Apocalpyse that was semi-normalized. The idea was that society had gone full circle, and things were like the "Middle Ages" only it was in the future. Fighting the Vampires had become a way of life, kind of like Attack on Titan.

The open world. For all my games, I try to make some level of "openness" to them. Normally by either player choices, or multiple endings. This one though, I can say is a "true" open-world game where the player can go where they want and explore. I think that part turned out well.

Grendel, is not exactly Krampus, but a really fun bad guy and villain. I had a lot of fun making his Temple at the end of the game too.

I finally got to make a big Defend the wall battle, something I've wanted to do since I played Helms Deep on my Xbox when I was a small kid.

What didn't work

Visually, I never really was able to hit that bar I wanted. I had to sacrifice a lot of visual elements to get the FPS I needed, and big open maps can be very challenging. Some maps look better than others, but I never did get the Black Forest to look good.

The controls still feel a little stiff. There is more of a learning curve with mastering the player than I would like, especially for new players.

I really like the Boomerang weapon and wish that idea was in the game from the start vs being added later on. It doesn't come into play outside of just cutting down enemies, it would have been nice if there were more puzzles for it and upgrades.

I ended up getting pretty far away from the original idea, which was that humanity was living inside giant domes with vampires outside. The domes would have auto locks that open during the day and shut at night. Some elements of this survived, for example, Dairy Town is still referred to as "that Dome" in the game text.

I'll keep everyone updated on how things pan out if I hear back from Microsoft.

Happy hunting.