The Three Night Shift
Three tighter nights, a smoother difficulty curve and fixes across enemies, performance, audio and furniture assembly. Old demo saves require a new game.
Stockroom Syndrome's demo has had a bit of a chunky overhaul, largely based on feedback from people who've been playing it.
The biggest change is that I've cut the demo campaign down from five levels to three much tighter nights. Also we get right into the scary stuff right away instead of a passive opening tutorial night!
A pretty consistent bit of feedback was that the demo was a little too long, and that the difficulty could ramp up a bit too sharply in places. I agreed.
Five levels was, frankly, more demo than the game really needed. The new three-night structure gets to the interesting stuff quicker, has a much smoother difficulty curve, and gives each night a stronger identity of its own.
Doing that meant changing quite a lot under the bonnet too - progression, lore, hauntings, furniture placement, difficulty scaling, the lot.
One important thing: old demo saves won't work with this version, so you'll need to start a new game.
Sorry if you were halfway through one, but the campaign has changed enough that trying to drag the old saves along with it would've caused more problems than it solved.
Alongside the bigger campaign changes, I've also gone through a lot of the smaller bits of feedback - enemy behaviour, performance, audio, furniture assembly and a handful of bugs that were cropping up during longer runs.
So, thank you to everyone who's played the demo, sent feedback, reported bugs, or simply got annoyed enough by something to tell me about it. It's genuinely helped shape this update.
v20261007-6 Changelog:
- Demo campaign reduced from five levels to a much tighter three-night structure
- Reworked difficulty scaling across the demo for a smoother progression
- Updated lore, hauntings and furniture placement to fit the new campaign
- Old saves are no longer compatible with the new demo structure
- Numerous mannequin behaviour and efficiency tweaks
- Fixed multiple mannequin perception and pathfinding issues
- Fixed duplicate AI perception and pathfinding behaviour
- Broken furniture joints can now make enough noise to attract the Echo from a distance
- Pushing the trolley now makes noise that enemies can hear
- Increased the likelihood of levitation-based hauntings compared to blood-based ones
- Reduced particle counts on bleeding walls and ceilings for better performance
- Multiple performance improvements relating to particle effects and pathfinding
- Fixed several slowdown issues that could crop up during longer levels
- Chair instructions now support building the back first, followed by all four legs, while still validating the finished chair properly
- Night Opening Tour no longer incorrectly set the stockroom exit flag or starts the effective timer
- FMOD audio now pauses properly through the master bus, including continuous and newly created sounds
- Tonttu now stays away for 30 seconds after being ragdolled if already in his angry state
- Scaled down the dinner tray holder and dinner trays in the restaurant
- Fixed a clipping issue with a skirting board in one of the displays
- Fixed a bug when entering crawling, so can now crawl underneath the Self Storage Warehouse racks
The last update let you trap the Tonttu underneath cardboard boxes and put boxes over mannequin heads.
This update contains slightly fewer boxes on heads and slightly more rebuilding large chunks of the game.
The end result should be a much better introduction to Stockroom Syndrome - shorter, smoother, more focused, and much closer to what the demo needed to be.
Thanks again to everyone who's played it so far and helped me knock it into shape.