A torch, a darker night, and what the dark hides

Seven headset passes (39 to 45) over about a day, all about one idea: Nightfall should be dark enough that a light in your hand matters, and the dark should be hiding something. Here is what got built, what held up, and the two times the game told me something that wasn't true.

A torch you actually hold

Nightfall is a mission attribute that makes a run take place at night. Before these passes the only light was the moon and the ember lamps you could relight. Now there's a torch. If you start a Nightfall run without one, the game hands you one. You hold it like any other item, hang it head-up on the backpack's carrier, and touch its flame to a lamp or brazier to light it (the flame has to come within 34 cm). Out of the grid it always burns, and a torch you're holding or have hung at the end of a run counts as carried home.

The first version used a KayKit stand-in model, and pass 39 said the basics worked. My asks were small things that make it feel like a real object. The flame should rise upright and trail behind when you swing it, not swing rigidly with the stick, so its particles now live in the world and the emitter turns upright every frame. The carrier should buzz my hand when the torch is close enough to hang, like the sword's sheath does (within 20 cm). And it needed an icon in the grid.

(Pass 39 also lost its last few asks: the notes panel's "more below" hint had been added to the end of the note, the very part that got cut off. Fixed.)

Pass 40 turned up rough edges from actually carrying it around. Pressing A on a held torch put it away, which looked like the torch vanishing out of my hand, so a held torch now offers nothing and snaps into the hand head-up. And the log explained firewood I kept finding on the boarding hulk's crushed bow, 2.92 m up, twelve times: the cast that finds the ground had landed on an overhang. Events now need open space above where they sit.

How dark is dark

The first Nightfall run I wore was set to "very dark" (the moon and ambient light at 15%), and it was too much for the Clearing. I picked "darker" (45%) as the default for normal areas. Then I worked out what I actually want. Darkness should depend on the place. A surface Nightfall like the Clearing is atmosphere: you can do it without a torch, and the dark hides loot. Caves and tombs underground should be near pitch black with no light. The torch is never required, but it's always worth carrying.

Related: loot no longer follows you into the next room. What's on a room's floor stays with that room. I'd like to go back for it with a map, at a cost in hourglass time, but that's designed, not built.

What the dark hides

Each Nightfall room in the Clearing now has two shadow pockets, tucked in the dark beside the wrecks, the debris and the foot of the ring. They're silent until your light finds them, and then you search with A for coin, or sometimes a gem.

The first version lied to me in pass 42. Every pocket revealed itself at exactly 4.5 m. That's the edge of the torch's glow range, where the light has faded to nothing. The check measured distance to the torch, which looked like "is it lit" but wasn't. Claude rewrote it to ask the question I meant. A pocket is lit when the torch's light, as Unity actually shapes it, reaches it. It's found when it's lit and I've looked at it, within 12 degrees for 0.3 seconds, with nothing in the way. The candidates are now cast against the real wrecks and debris: 232 spots, 129 of them hidden from the middle of the room. In pass 43 the glint followed the light, and finding a pocket felt like my doing.

I also got more gems than expected: three in seven pockets. The design said one in five, and measuring over 4,000 pockets across 200 seeds gave 20.9%, so it was working as written. I just wanted it rarer. It's one in ten now, measured at 10.4% over 4,000.

The other lie of pass 43: the game was completely silent, and I spent a while assuming we'd broken audio. Unity's own level in the Windows Volume mixer was at zero. The Meta menu's sound mirror had been hiding it, because sounds there still played. That's now the first thing on the checklist when the headset goes quiet.

Astra's torches, and textures that weren't

Astra delivered two real torches to replace the stand-in: a plain one, and an iron cresset as its upgrade, which throws more light. Pass 44 settled the grip, the extra light, the hang by the hook, and the flame while hung. But both torches were untextured.

It turned out five of our own textures had imported as Cubemaps, so their materials drew nothing and nothing complained. The cause was a hand-written .meta file holding only an ID. That included Astra's arena backdrop, which had shown only its night tint since it went in. The importer now forces our textures to be flat, and a test sweeps every texture we own. It failed on exactly those five before the fix.

The cresset is for sale now: it hangs on a peg in the hub for 100 coin, trading in your plain torch. I also asked for the drop beam to go away once you pick an item up, since it's a "pick me up" marker. In pass 45 the rack, both textured torches and the backdrop all held. The backdrop "looks great" by night and by day.

Still rough

• I saw a drop beam come back when I set down a torch I'd pulled from the grid, and the log can't account for it. Every beam raised and lowered is logged now, for next time.
• "Darker" is the one darkness level I haven't worn on its own.
• The dark puzzles and extra loot for underground places, and the map back to earlier rooms, are ideas on paper.
• Every number in the shadow pockets (two per room, the coin range, the gem rate) is still a first guess, apart from the gem rate I asked for.