One More Night v0.5.0: Between Nights & The Balance Pass
The last update committed One More Night to being a survival horror road trip. This one makes the moment-to-moment numbers live up to it — and pulls two screens into one. v0.5.0 is two big pieces of work: a unified Between Nights hub, and a ground-up rebalance.
The Between Nights Hub
Previously, the shop (between nights) and your equipment screen (mid-night, on pause) were two separate places that never talked to each other. You could buy gear at the shop but couldn’t equip it until you were back in the dark — and when you sold things, you were doing it blind, with no idea whether you were dumping an upgrade.
Now it’s one screen. Your full loadout sits on the left — every slot, filled or empty — with a live stats panel that updates as you equip. Buy and sell sit alongside it, and every item compares itself to what you’re already wearing: green arrows when something’s an upgrade, a “better than worn” flag so you don’t accidentally sell it, and a confirm prompt before you part with anything rare. Equipped gear can’t be sold at all. It’s the difference between managing your survivor and guessing.
The Balance Pass
Here’s the honest part: under the hood, One More Night still carried scaling from its arcade past — enemy counts that doubled into the hundreds, health and damage that climbed exponentially. That’s wave-defense math, and it fights the whole identity of the game. So we tore it out.
We did it deliberately, against published difficulty-curve design (interest curves, the “death floor,” power-fantasy ceilings, the bullet-sponge anti-pattern) rather than by feel. The result:
- Fewer, deadlier zombies. A handful of real threats at a time, not a horde to mow down. Density is survival-horror, not arcade.
- A fair floor. Nights 1–2 are a grace period. If you don’t scavenge, equip, and upgrade, the nights start killing you a few stops in — progressively, never with a cheap one-shot.
- A real ceiling. Lean into gear and upgrades and a fully-kitted survivor feels genuinely powerful — without trivializing the late game, where tougher zombie variants keep you honest.
- Upgrades that count. We also found and fixed a bug that was silently throwing away your purchased upgrades, mastery, and level-ups. They apply now.
The economy was retuned to match — with fewer kills, each one matters more, and the road to a strong loadout is reachable without being a handout.
Under the Hood
Less visible, but worth saying: this release also shipped the project’s first full security audit (which found and fixed a leaderboard issue and added automated security checks to the build), and raised automated test coverage past 85% across the board, with that bar now enforced so it can’t quietly slip. Boring, load-bearing work — the kind that keeps the fun stuff from breaking.
What’s Next
The road to a Steam release: store assets, a trailer, and the desktop build polish. The game underneath is in the best shape it’s ever been.
Play the latest at night.echoforge.games. Tell us how the new balance feels on Discord.
— Bruno