I’m not exactly breaking the bank with my Linux sales, so I’ve decided to release Nightfall Hacker on the Snap Store, for free. The Snap Store is pre-installed on Ubuntu (and most derivatives), Manjaro, and several others, and can be installed on other distros. You can install Nightfall Hacker with:

sudo snap install nightfall-hacker

I’ve been getting some feedback that it’s not clear where the tutorial is. I’ve made it more obvious by putting the button to launch it right in the introductory message. I didn’t expect to be pushing an update 24 hours after launch, but here I am. It’s live on Steam now.

I’m happy to say that Nightfall Hacker will (finally) be launching on Steam on Wednesday the 10th of March. Have a look.

I made another YouTube channel. Let’s see if this one gets taken down too.

I added a new trailer and some updated screenshots to Nightfall Hacker’s Steam page. I also changed the release year to 2021, because there’s no way it’ll be finished by the end of the year.

Have a look: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1204080/Nightfall_Hacker/

I started developing this game on the 9th of September 2019. I started this blog shortly after. With my development speed in the beginning, I guessed I could finish it by June or July. Hofstadter’s law amirite?

Anyway, it’s still very much active. I just have less to post because I’m now working on the story and battles more than the mechanics.

I’d previously been getting information about The Nightfall Incident from other people’s playthroughs and my own saved game. The layout of the battles is easy enough, but I also have to know how much each credit pickup is worth. The information isn’t listed anywhere I could find, but it’s displayed in the game when you collect a pickup. Unfortunately, in every playthrough video I could find, the person always misses some pickups. The only way I could do it was by playing the game, collecting every credit pickup, and recording it so I catch the second or so when the value of each pickup is shown on-screen. The result is probably the longest and most complete video of the game anywhere.

I’ve put it on YouTube in case it’s useful to anyone else. My YouTube account got terminated, so instead it’s on LBRY with the rest of my videos. It’s also embedded here, but it might take a long time to load because it’s so big (~1GB):

I added some sound effects to the game. They’re from Jonathan Shaw’s UI Mechanical. Here’s a video that also serves to demonstrate the lighter colour scheme:

I made a lighter colour scheme to contrast with the dark and edgy theme I’ve been using until now. You can choose which one to use in-game. I just have to decide which one to make the default. Pictures:

In the campaigns, I’ll need a way to display and navigate between each battle. I did that with a tree-like menu:

That’s not a full campaign in the picture, just a few placeholder battles. The idea is that each battle will be owned by a person or company, each with their own logo, hence the placeholder logo on each button. A grey button represents an uncompleted story battle, a blue button represents an uncompleted side battle, and a green button represents a completed battle of either type.

The shop works, and saving and loading campaigns is functional, including money and programs.

The font in the buttons is Play, and the placeholder logo and padlock icons are made by Freepik from flaticon.com