post edited on 1/23/2026

Intro

Hello. I told you I would write this after the last post.

So I uploaded this around the new years. I kinda wanna go into 2026 with the mindset of trying to be more active on the game than I was last year. I'm pretty happy with the amount of stuff I've worked on in 2025. I wanna keep that momentum going, y'know? I'll try to update this game as often as I can. Just now that even if I'm not posting any updates, I'm still working on the game and I'm very very focused and locked in!!!

Day Cycles ??

As you can see, I added day cycles to the game. This isn't going to be super significant to the entire game, at least not that I know of as of now. I mainly added it for the sake of Chapter 0. I want the game to start out in a sort of 3-day sequence: You do certain things on day 1, do other things on day 2, and then shit hits the fan on day 3, and then the game goes from there.That was pretty much my intention with this, but I wouldn't doubt this mechanic could open up a lot of possibilities with like easter eggs, special items showing up at certain days, and so on. But for now, I'm keeping  it isolated to Chapter 0. 

I ran into some bugs when programming this. At first, none of the items would spawn when I wanted them to or it wouldn't stay hidden when I picked them up and leave the scene and come back. I basically just added a double-check to make extra sure the items I picked up were indeed picked up (though I might remove it later cuz it is a bit redundant upon viewing the code again) and I changed it to where the item's sprite was hidden rather than the entire object being disabled (that's what prevented the items from showing up). After some tests, it worked! It feels kinda cool interacting with the bed and "wake up" to see new items appear. Makes it feel a little bitmore alive.

Optimization

Obviously it doesn't seem very apparent, but I've also been optimizing the game. It sorta got to the point where my laptop was getting unreasonably hot while running ABADDON. I started picking up some stuff from what I've gathered online and went to work to make the game lighter and easier to run. I realized all of my textures were defaulted to a size/resolution of 2040...which is too much - like WAY too much. Of course the first thing I did was reducing them to about 64-128. Doing this alone reduced the current size of the game (from 138 MB to I think 131 MB). 

The biggest challenge was getting a handle of static objects and occlusion culling. When I tried making my objects static, it would drastically change the lighting of my meshes, making them look ugly. Didn't like it. I eventually found out that only checking bake static, occlusion static, and occludee static would make the objects static while keeping the lighting I intended. Next, was occlusion culling. One of the heaviest levels was the inside of the house, House0_Main. I didn't realize it until now that there was just sooo many objects. Not just for the furniture, but I made several objects to make up the floors, walls, ceiling, etc. This is where ProBuilder really came in clutch, cuz I essentially had Blender at home. I didn't feel like switching programs just to optimize the area. Anyway, I made the floors into bigger chunks, same with the ceiling and the walls. Made those static and occluded. It originally had over +200 objects, now it's only about 20 (if I remember correctly, still a very significant change).

Last thing I did was fixing up the lighting and shadows. I looked at the frame debugger for the first time to investigate on the root cause of the game's heavy performance and found out that there were too many shadows being rendered - like WAY too many...too many shadows on places where the player wouldn't even see them in the first place. I went to almost every object and disabled cast shadows. Turned off shadows for almost all the lights. And adjusted the lighting settings so that the resolution of the lightmap/shadowmap was reduced to 32 instead of 2040. Once I finally regenerated the lighting and playtested the game, it finally ran so so much better. The current size of the game is now 121 MB and it no longer takes up a whole lot of memory.

TLDR: Game wasn't performing well. I optimized the levels and adjusted assets that were too costly and it now runs awesomely.

Next Devlog (Benadryl Edition)

Next devlog is even more simple. You'll see what I mean and where I may go with this.