Hello everyone, and welcome to Friday Night Death Slot: The Audience Engagement Update!

We, the crew behind FNDS care a lot about your feedback and have taken a lot of things into consideration after the launch of the game for the Extra Credits Holiday Game Jam. We've decided to take a lot of those suggestions we've received and put them all together into a hefty update - it's a whole new game now! Let's go through each and every one of the changes we have made to make it easier to grasp.

ASSIST MODE

Yes, now you can finally play FNDS even though you're not good at it! We have heard a lot of complaints about the game being very challenging, and while the game's difficulty is essential to the gameplay, that doesn't mean we can't help the people who are not able to play because of said difficulty, and that's why in this update you can now enable Assist Mode through the main menu and modify certain variables that will make the game easier.

Before being able to enable Assist Mode, you'll read a warning - make sure not to skip this, as it details what Assist Mode is and what it isn't, and who is it meant for - the people that want to experience Friday Night Death Slot, but are not able to because of its difficulty. After this prompt, you'll be asked if you want to enable Assist Mode, and if the answer is yes, you'll be transported to a new menu full of options.

We'll go through each and every option one-by-one.

Invincibility - This toggle makes you invincible to certain in-game hazards! What this means right now is spikes and a brand-new hazard, Spotlights (featured in 3 of the new levels). In future updates, this toggle will be able to make you invincible to other hazards. Of course, invincibility doesn't mean "undefeatability", and you can still die by falling through pits and running out of time in an individual level.

Game speed - If your reflexes aren't what they used to be, you can use this option to lower the game speed, from 100% (default) all the way down to 50%. If you can't really make it through certain parts of the game or you'd prefer to have the option to make more skillful jumps, you might want to turn this on.

Time per level - What this does is allow you to modify the time you have to beat each room. Normally you'd have six seconds to beat a room, and the rooms would be designed to be beatable with all three Audience Tokens under six seconds, but one of the main complaints the game has had is that six seconds is not enough to make it to the end in time. Here, you can up the time per level from 6 seconds all the way up to 12 seconds, and everything in between.

Audience tolerance - Every 0.3 seconds that passes, 1% of your audience will decrease. This is to encourage players to take as less time as possible to beat a level. With this setting, you can up this up to 0.8 seconds per 1% of audience, which will make it pretty easy to stand still on a level and not lose that much of an audience.

You can save the Assist Mode settings at any time by pressing ENTER or START, and disable Assist Mode by pressing ESC or BACK. Keep in mind that while Assist Mode is in-game, it's considered as game-breaking and as such will disable online functionality and best scores in-game until it's disabled to prevent leaderboard cheating. However, these are small parts of the gameplay and we hope you'll be able to enjoy Friday Night Death Slot regardless. Speaking of which...

ONLINE FEATURES

Friday Night Death Slot: The Audience Engagement Update now features ONLINE FUNCTIONALITY! This means that, with a Gamejolt account (don't worry, you can still play on Itch!) you'll be able to upload your scores, see the top 10 international high scores, look at every score ever submitted through Gamejolt and redeem brand-new Gamejolt Trophies! This is all very exciting stuff, because this means that for the very first time you can compare your high-score with the world at large and see how good you actually are at the game. For now, top 10 high-scores, score uploads and trophy redeemability are the only available options, but maybe in the next coming updates we will see more exciting new online features? For now, upload your scores and let's see who's the best the world has ever seen. >:)

UI CHANGES

We've changed two main things of the game that have to do with UI management, and first and foremost is the in-game UI. To accomodate for the new Assist Mode's "changing the time per level" mechanic and because many people didn't get that the kitchen timer (a remnant from an earlier version of the game, to be honest) was supposed to indicate the time you have left in the level, we've changed it to round numbers and moved the Audience-O-Meter (patent pending) to the rightmost side of the screen. UI design is hard, so this, and especially the clock's colour, is open to changes for future updates. If you have anything to suggest, feel free to do so!

On the other side, you have the main menu, which while it's perfectly serviceable for a simple arcade game, we had to modify it to include Online and Assist Mode without clogging up the other buttons. That and its lack of support for UDLR/D-pad/analogue stick is what prompted us to update it to something more scalable, with different buttons for Play, Settings, Online, Assist Mode and an extra button to close the game if you're on desktop. And hey, if we ever add more game modes in the future, there'll always be a place for those!

AND EVERYTHING ELSE

This might not be the most exciting category of all, but it is the most important in some places. To begin with, this is a platformer, and as MrJoshuaMclean suggested on its EC Game Jam stream, we should add D-pad controls to a platformer that already has gamepad support. Now not only we have analogue stick and ULDR controls, we also implemented D-PAD AND WASD controls, and all four (with the exception of Analogue on Assist Mode) can be used for everything, from gameplay to menus! Also, the main menu and Online have mouse controls to make them easier to use. Yay for inclusivity!

Along with that, every new update will include new levels and obstacles, and this one brings a lot: 40% of the levels in-game are brand new, never-seen-before! This update also includes a new obstacle: the Spotlight, a light-emitting LED that will switch on and off every second or so. Don't get touched by the light while it's on, or it's back to the start for you. Watch out for more rooms in the near future!

Of course, a lot of bugfixes and updates were in due. Some of them were: full-screen not working properly, HTML5 build's top scores broken, analogue stick in settings not working as normal, three levels not showing up in random selection, pausing and unpausing while game hasn't started breaks the Audience-O-Meter, Linux and Mac OS builds having an earlier version of the game and some other small fixes.

THE BOTTOM LINE

As the Extra Credits game jam drew to a close, a lot of features that were meant to be in game didn't make it in on time. We hope that this update will give you more playtime and that it's something you might enjoy for a lot of time. Thank you very much for playing Friday Night Death Slot, everybody! Catch you on the next update/devlog.

Play The Audience Engagement Update now!

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