house party update

Hey guys!

A huge thanks to all of you who have been enjoying the Liz Katz Gritty Kitty Murder Mystery DLC.  The feedback has been very positive, and we are happy to have brought another chapter of House Party to you.

We know a lot of you are wondering what comes next, and although we are still working on one more DLC for House Party, we’ve been starting to shift our focus to Office Party as well!

We are optimizing and adding new capabilities to our engine to create a more robust foundation heading into Office Party.  This will help improve the game performance and allow for new features that Office Party will have, that House Party doesn’t.  A big one of those things is clothing customization!

Just because we are transitioning into working on the Office Party engine doesn’t mean that House Party can’t reap the benefits of some of the upgrades and optimizations that we are doing.  In the next Alpha and Beta releases of the House Party base game we will be leveraging the groundwork we’ve been laying down for Office Party, to optimize House Party’s performance, and bring some new features to the mix.

Character Customization:

The most exciting new feature that you’ll see is character customization!  You’ll be able to change colors, patterns, decals (on some characters), skin tone, hair root and tip color, and even add effects like emboss and metallic to some clothing pieces.  Check out more example outfits:

We’re Switching to Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP):

We’ll be taking even more advantage of HDRP’s capabilities in Office Party, but we’re enhancing House Party too!  In House Party, you’ll notice amazing new lighting and shadows and visual upgrade to the house and all of the characters!  Take a look at some work in progress HDRP screenshots below:

Overall Engine Optimization:

We’ve made some major under-the-hood optimizations resulting in less of a memory footprint and improved CPU and GPU performance resulting in:

– Save file size reduced from ~35MB to ~1MB.
– Save/Load times greatly reduced.
– New game load time greatly reduced.

Check us out on Patreon!
https://patreon.com/eekgames

Winter is here, brahs!

Download the completely free House Party – Winter Holiday Pack to keep your party merry and bright all year long!

Party in a festive, Christmas-themed version of Madison’s house full of holiday cheer – with snowflakes falling outside, opportunities for snowball-throwing, a hysterical new short Frank side-story quest, and your favorite party-goers bundled up in themed Santa, elf, and reindeer hats and ugly sweaters!

Much like the House Party – Halloween Holiday Pack, the House Party – Winter Holiday Pack is a permanent, year-round version of the limited-time 2022 seasonal winter update.

Unlike the haunting vibes from the Halloween DLC, the Winter DLC introduces pine garlands, hanging lights, glowing candy canes, star-shaped lights, ornaments, a snowman, and snowflake window decals to the party space.

There’s plenty to explore with the return of this fun-filled holiday. Armed with a bucket of snowballs at your side, get ready to pelt your favorite NPCs with snowballs to see their hysterical reactions and collect Frank’s special holiday steam achievement in his funny seasonal side quest!

Thank you for waiting while our team worked hard to get this event permanently prepared for you!

If you missed our post on the House Party – Halloween Holiday Pack, we explained that we hadn’t expected either of these seasonal events to be so loved by players. But, many of you requested for us to keep them around permanently, and we wanted to do that for you!

Since these events weren’t originally built to be in the game full dash time, we had to essentially completely rebuild both of them so they could be in the game permanently.

We didn’t want to compromise our normal development, so we tried to keep up our original planned pace and prepare these two seasonal DLCs alongside our original plans. Of course, this took a bit longer than we expected, and these events have permanently dropped at an odd time of the year, but we hope you’re happy to finally see them back for good!

What did the full restructuring of these two seasonal DLCs include?

• The DLCs are optional and won’t bloat your base game if you never plan to play or install them
• You can toggle on and off the DLCs if you ever don’t feel like playing the Halloween or Winter content
• We insured that merging the DLCs with house party wouldn’t create any major bugs or issues that would impact the short or long-term health of the base game
• And, most exciting, we future-proofed the DLC so more content can be added in future updates!

As we mentioned with the House Party – Halloween Holiday Pack, you won’t see any gameplay or content changes or new cosmetics in this DLC yet, but we have plenty more planned to come in the future.

We’ve also laid down a framework while restructuring both of these DLCs that will allow us to add a brand new free feature for all players. It is super exciting, and something many of you requested in our Future Of House Party Feedback Form. We can’t wait to share it with you!

And, speaking of, now that both of these awesome seasonal DLCs are finally released, we have so much on the horizon.

The release of the House Party – Detective Liz Catz in a Gritty Kitty Murder Mystery Expansion Pack is right around the corner, there are exciting new updates feature updates coming in our roadmap, and, toward the end of the year, we plan to release the House Party – New Content Pack, featuring two new characters from the House Party Universe!

For now, just look forward to everything cool that’s on the way, and enjoy the winter-themed party!