A Little Light Refurbishment

New furniture, rebuilt retail displays, better store layouts and a substantial performance overhaul. HØLM has been busy.

Stockroom Syndrome Demo — v261015-2

What started as adding some floor lamps has turned into a fairly substantial refurbishment of the entire shop.

I've rebuilt the retail displays, added more of them, reworked how the store puts itself together, and spent a considerable amount of time making everything run better. There are new layouts, new furniture, better lighting, and quite a few fixes for things that were making the night shift more frustrating than it needed to be.

HØLM management would like to remind staff that improved working conditions do not constitute grounds for a pay rise.

A shop full of actual shop things

The retail displays have had a complete overhaul, with new models, signage, stock arrangements and a lot more variety throughout the store. I've also revised the overhead signs so that finding your way around should make a little more sense.

All floor-lamp families are now in. Lampshades now glow when their bulbs are on, and table lamps and floor lamps keep their intended finishes instead of being randomly assigned wood, metal or black.

The store generation has had a sizeable rework too, with new sections and layout types, revised furniture placement, and changes to how displays fit together. Story and custom modes now draw from the same generation pool.

The result should feel much more like wandering around an enormous furniture shop after closing time. Whether that makes you feel better or worse is probably a personal matter.

Considerably less work for your computer

A large part of this update has been spent on performance.

I've reworked how the retail displays, textures, materials and ceilings are rendered, cutting down the number of separate things the game has to draw. During development, the texture and material work alone reduced texture memory by roughly 30%, with savings of at least 500 MB per night, and brought the build size down from around 900 MB to around 400 MB.

Actual performance will depend on your hardware and what's happening in the store, but this has made a substantial difference in my testing.

I've also given the visuals another pass, adjusting the lighting, bloom and colour, and replacing the concrete shop floor with wood. As the haunting escalates, the overhead lighting and the distance the store lights reach now change with it.

We've made the shop nicer. Something will presumably take that personally.

Slightly more manageable workplace concerns

Stress now recovers four times as quickly, and the breathing recovery has been shortened too, so getting back to work after a fright should be less drawn out. The same object also can't catch fire more than once within 30 seconds.

There are more ways to contain the Tonttu. Restaurant bins and wire containers now have proper trapping volumes, and being trapped takes priority over his attempts to recover his navigation or teleport away.

Cardboard furniture boxes still need to be opened and turned upside down before they'll trap him. There are standards to maintain.

I've also fixed several problems in the second tutorial, including one where separate tables could be treated as the same task and leave you stuck repeatedly being told to return a table.

v261015 Changelog

Furniture, displays and store generation

• Added all floor-lamps as buildable furniture.

• Completely overhauled the retail displays and added more display variants.

• Added new retail models, signage and collider setups.

• Revised overhead signage to make navigation clearer.

• Added new store sections and layout types.

• Unified the generation pool used by story and custom modes.

• Revised HØLM display layouts, including clearer access to display fronts and improved backing arrangements.

• Expanded the use of suitable perimeter fixtures across ordinary store layouts.

• Improved furniture placement in more open store sections.

• Updated floor-lamp displays to use a low table for the lamp and a medium table for boxed stock.

• Made cushion display items pickupable.

• Added an exit sign and a shift rota to the stockroom area.

• Corrected the shared tray-holder scale so both displays use the smaller size.

Performance and visuals

• Reduced renderer counts and draw calls across the retail displays.

• Reworked texture and material batching, substantially reducing texture memory use and build size.

• Added ceiling mesh batching.

• Removed light-probe generation.

• Revised environmental lighting, bloom and saturation.

• Replaced the store's concrete flooring with wood.

• Lampshades now become emissive when their bulbs are on.

• Table lamps and floor lamps retain their intended finishes.

• Overhead lighting now responds to the department's haunting tier.

• Store-light range now decreases as the haunting tier increases.

• Fixed the television light.

• Fixed the Echo's wings becoming visible again.

Gameplay and creatures

• Increased stress recovery speed fourfold and shortened breathing recovery.

• Added a 30-second cooldown before the same object can catch fire again.

• Added Tonttu trapping volumes to restaurant bins, wire baskets and wire bins. Basically you can now pick up the Tonttu and drop him in the bin in the restaurant which is really satisfying if you hate him.

• Prevented Tonttu navigation recovery and teleporting from overriding trapping.

• Restaurant bins can also affect mannequins; wire baskets and wire bins only trap the Tonttu.

• Added three Lefty Luusi gameplay tips covering mannequin heads, missing items and trapping the Tonttu.

• Set restaurant food spawning to a 25% chance per socket.

• Fixed the pushable trolley.

Tutorials, assembly and fixes

• Fixed separate tables being incorrectly grouped together in Tutorial 2, causing a repeated “return table” instruction.

• Improved tutorial display detection for boxes and furniture parts spawned inside the display.

• Fixed lost tutorial progress when opening boxes or collecting screws early.

• Fixed screws from bags being counted twice.

• Assigned the required contact colliders to both connector prefabs.

• Delayed Tutorial 1 mannequin movement until the correct furniture box has been picked up.

• Improved box packing to reduce furniture parts spawning through the floor and ending up in the Lost Parts Bin.

• Corrected the stress icon's positioning on 16:9 and 16:10 screens.

Thanks again to everyone who's been playing the demo and sending feedback. There's a lot in this one, and I'm looking forward to seeing how you get on with the refurbished store.

Please try to keep it tidy. I've just done the floors.

Originally posted on Steam