Trailer and final screenshots

In this concluding post I would like to present to you the trailer I recently cut for the game.
The project and report are now long submitted, and this blog is hereby, likely, at its end.
So here is the last screenshots of the final product (for now). Hope you enjoy.

Final Polish and Fixes

It's the final week of final year project, and our last chance to make changes and polish the game.
By the end of last week already we had worked through our list of major bugs, but playtests over the weekend, as well as monday, showed some more flaws that we immediately put onto a to-fix list for monday.
We worked through these last changes as well. Tonight, I will be running one last playtest before the submission. My most reliable playtester will likely find something else for us to fix.

My job for the rest of the week is to cut and edit the video submission, whilst Cian can work on last bug fixes that might be needed. He has also started working on technological documentation for the report, as there are a lot of important scripts to work through.

In terms of assets, there is little new this or last week. I added an animation to the icicles crushing the player in the freezer and put up a few more decorations here and there, but overall, the front end was mostly completed already.
We added the final cutscenes that finally open the front door of the mansion and allow the player to walk out into an endlessly scrolling hallway. The only way to end the game is by giving up and turning back to return to Orpheus. When the player walks into the light flooding the hallway from the entrance hall, the game fades to white and end credits roll!

New playtesters are now taking about an hour to complete the game. We are very happy with that, as that means a good amount of content to submit.

Here's a recap of the last one and a half weeks:

What I did:

•  three playtests, revealing last unexpected bugs. (1 male, 2 female)
• added sound to freezer and library
• added paintings with hints towards the chess room solution into various rooms

• designed a custom Icon for the game application.

• 

• added dialogue with the "Man with Bowtie" to Orpheus' bedroom. The ghost that haunts the paintings in the house can now be talked to, and comes with his own portrait. 

• added scene in beginning. Player now has to steal a few items before he can leave the first room, and will then walk into the intro cutscene where Orpheus shoots him. This scene will hopefully clarify why the player entered the house in the first place, and why he is shot by Orpheus in the following scene. The cutscene in this opening scene also includes more detailed and readable control instructions.
•  completed this scene with cutscene, sounds and flavour text

• styled endlessly scrolling hallway
• styled and edited credits
• decorative spiderwebs are now permanently removed after the library is cleared

•  added two more portraits to Orpheus and the servant and implemented these in the game

• - I edited the pause menu to include a "return to bedroom" button instead of a "main menu" button. Returning to the main menu would mean either quitting the game or going through the entire intro sequence again - it served little purpose for players at this stage and would only be useful in the future if game saves or options were introduced. What we did use the main menu for however was to reset the player to the start room in case he got stuck during a playtest. Now this can be done by just resetting straight to the start room. 

This is primarily an emergency-fix.

• Designed and coded cutscenes for entering Eurydice's bedroom and opening the entrance door. I also finalized the piano cutscene to work smoothly now and added a short, sudden cutscene into the basement.

• we made the reading lamp in the living room static. 
•  arrow that indicates the book in the servant quarters now turns off when being interacted with and remains off when the first stage has concluded.

• minor fixes around the house: Fixing alignment issues, editing hitboxes, setting light priorities, adding small interactons, proof reading, etc.

And what Cian did (amongst other things):

• fixed confusing issue where dark monsters would spawn ontop of safe lights in the basement. They now flicker somewhat across the center of the room, but it should be easier now for players to understand when they are safe and when they are not.

•  added death to the freezer room with icicles crushing the player.
• fixed issues with the knife in the library. It would previously not interact with objects other than the spiders, and would often even fail to stab the spiders in the built version of the game.
• Fixed various stage issues where dialogue or positioning would be wrong and interfere with the correct execution of cut scenes. He also now sorted all remaining issues with the keyholder opening and locking doors, meaning it should now be impossible to sequence break the game.
• made two logical solutions possible in the chess room. (this was a response to the playtest I conducted over the weekend.)
• Made it so the player can now scroll through items left and right, using Q and R
• fixed issue where player would move quicker when moving diagonally.
• chess statue will now present the tuning key and remain opened when the player returns. The checkmate situation will also remain unmoveable and static. Finally, the chess guardian displays different dialogue after the tuning key has been removed.

So this is it!

We have nearly reached the end of our beloved project. 

Hopefully we will be able to expand the game a little over the holidays and add more rooms in the future. We still have many plans for this project, but we are satisfied with the completion of a roughly one hour long game that can be played smoothly from start to finish.

All that is left to do is see if we can discover and final-final bugs, editing the game play video, and submitting the House of  Orpheus.

The Final Stage

With the presentation behind us, there really is not much time left to complete the project. We have decided not to plan too much for these remaining weeks so that we may polish the game as best as we can.

The goals were, hence, to complete the chess room we had prototyped and styled already, to overhaul the library by replacing the shooting with melee knife combat, to update the freezer room and allow player death, and to enable various cutscenes throughout the game, with focus on the ending scene.

Cian outdid himself this week with getting things done, because the chessroom is already completed, the library is overhauled, and the freezer is also done. He has even coded the infinite scrolling for the final hallway, in other words: We can use all of next week for cutscenes and adding little things here and there.

Here's what I have done this week:

• Walking, shooting and idle animations for Orpheus
• Player cutting with knife animations, linked up to the attacks 
• set up a short fungus cutscene for the first encounter with orpheus
• wrote a script to fade audio in and out from the game controller so that we may call this from fungus, as fungus did not work out for us on its own in that regard
• blocked out the piano cutscene
• added animations and sound to the chess room

 The goal is checkmate: move the available white pieces into position so that the enemy king is placed in check mate. If the player has put all the pieces in the right direction, a white light will glow underneath them to signify to them that the puzzle is won.

 The state provides a hint as to how to solve the puzzle. There is also a book in the library with instructions on how chess pieces move in the real game. When the checkmate is achieved, the statue moves its scepter and the player can pick up the tuning key for the piano from a secret compartment in its base.

Upon activation, the gong will flood the room with light and play a gong sound effect. All the pieces are moved back to their starting positions, allowing the player to reattempt the puzzle if pieces were accidentally pushed into the wrong places. 

• updated the entrance hall style

• rewrote the dialogue in the entire game to fit an easier to understand, more streamlined narrative
• Made it so that candlestands around the house can be lit with the matches (however, they go off again when the room is left, so whilst this is a nice mechanic it comes with slight cause for irritation. Will inquire with playtesters about this.)
• added a bed into the basement that will be unmade by a shadowy monster whenever it is made.
• added furniture to the bottom left of the living room that had so far been empty.
• fixed the opening dialogue not showing up in built version by making it an on-start function

And last but not least, Cian and I rehauled many of the stages in the game so far. We added stages in whenever a puzzle is fixed but has not yet been reported back to Orpheus to avoid players running to puzzles before the instruction of what to do there has even been given. This meant editing all the triggers and keyholders in the house, checking through all goal-conditions, updating the item stage ID's, and it threw up a great great number of bugs that required many slow playthroughs to fix.

Overall we are very well on track to seeing this through to completion, and I have some time to add in a few more prettier looking animations and sound effects. I have plans for what we could do if we end up with some extra time, but that is better left to the future for now.

First PlayTesters and back to Content Creation

These past weeks Cian and I have focused on smoothing out the game's core mechanics and narrative to create a good half hour of fluent content for our play testers. In the opinion of the people who played the game thus far, we have succeeded well enough in doing so. The game is mostly bug free and the narrative is continuous.

My most faithful playtesters, who took a vivid interest in the game from the start, played the game on Tuesday for an hour, checking absolutely everything for interactions and bugs, Thanks to his thorough playthrough, I was able to correct some hitbox issues I had overseen.

He also made the helpful suggestion to add obstructions to the dark room. This was later further supported by a second playtester who made a similar comment, regarding the dark room puzzle being too easy to walk through. I have added several pieces of furniture into the basement to obstruct the path, and indeed it is much more challenging now, requiring even me to stop a moment to wait for the lights to turn back on. The scene also looks a lot more interesting now.

The Library is still found to be somewhat buggy, as bullets still shoot into wrong directions, are interfered with by furniture hitboxes, and beeing shot whilst cleaning will freeze the player permanently. (this happened twice in the first tester's playthrough, and could only be avoided by reloading the game through the main menu.)

Locking rooms in the beginning means that the players will eventually go to the living room to be introduced to the game, however we find repeatedly that players will walk around the core of the house and miss the first triggers, because they end up picking up the matches before they even enter the living room. We are not yet sure how to further indicate to go straight to the core in the beginning. Perhaps we will have to force the player movement at this stage, or we can accept that an initial observation of the darkness and cold might simply be lost. It is no severe issue, but can lead to some disorientation in the beginning.
So far, we can already tell from our playtesters that the genre they usually play dictates how they perceive the game. Those that play puzzle and mystery games and enjoy a narrative arc approach the house a little slower, hence finding the clues and name plates that assist with navigation and orientation. The FPS player that we had playtest on Thursday on the other hand wanted the game to progress faster and ran past most of the clues. He found his way eventually when he slowed down to orientate himself.

This playtester was watched closely by another who took a turn at the game and made very insightful and valueable comments in the questionnaire they both filled out. We got some helpful suggestion towards the dark room puzzle and the UI design, and some good feedback on the general difficulty of puzzles. Once again, this player leans more towards strategy games and showed better aptitude at completing the puzzles and navigating the house.


As playability, continuity and bug-free-ness are now mostly assured, we can go back to creating more content for the game. We have sorted out the core UI, dialogue management, trigger management, inventory and  warp-management, so that from now on, we are only expanding but could finish the game at any point.

Yesterday and today I therefore went back to asset creation. I drew up the furniture for Orpheus' and Eurydice's room and styled them in the editor today. They both look quite lovely and add two more explorable locations to the game.

We also decided to add another inhabitant to the house - a bird-masked ghost that unlocks the doors in the house as desired by Orpheus. He will appear when the player passes a door that is being freshly unlocked, to signal to them that a new room is now available. We are hoping that aside from adding ncie flourish and some creepiness, it will also assist with the navigation of the house. (players that just randomly run around the house after each stage will now receive some visual indication that things have changed.)

Next week we are hoping to finish up the chessroom and spider room puzzle, as these are both prototyped and ready in terms of assets. The chessroom is already fully styled, and Masie for the spider room is animated and just needs to spawn to kill the player when they get entangled in webs. As next week is also presentation week, it is not certain yet how much of this we will get done, but within the next two weeks we should be able to add a fair amount of extra content. We are also hoping to use fungus more to add more cut scenes, making the interactions with orpheus more imapctful and cinematic.

For the upcoming presentation, we will be filming and cutting a video of gameplay rather than demonstrating our actual application, as the content is too long to present sensibly during a powerpoint presentation. We expect playtesters to consistently take 25 to 30 minutes in playing the game, so we hope that by adding a few more puzzles, cutscenes and explorable areas, this can be pushed up to an hour of content. We'd be very happy with this game length for our final year project.

It's going good! This project has become a real labour of love and we are enjoying seeing it grow more engaging and immersive over time.

Ready for Playtest

No screenshots in this quick update. 7th of March, 2017

The last problems are figured out, the game seems to run, at least to our knowledge, quite bugfree. I added more books to the library, and the bathroom door has been moved next to the freezer and is frozen over in the beginning.
Orpheus will now accept the book with fitting dialogue and then move on. He can also now be found reading in his chair after the book stage has been completed.
A few more triggers have been placed so that the narrative should, hopefully, go a lot smoother now. And since rooms can be locked in the beginning now, players can't accidentally skip contentor do the puzzles too early.

We have also implemented fungus for a cinematic intro scene that adds some suspense and sense to the story! After clicking "Start" in the main menu, we can now see the player character walk down a moon lit hallway to the sound of storm and rain. Orpheus confronts him at the end, calling him a thief, and we fade to black before he shoots him. The player then awakes in the start room and the game begins.

There were a few more bug fixes and minor additions, but overall, the important thing is that we are now ready for playtesting the content we have so far, so the rest of this week will be spent obtaining playtesters and their opinions.

We will also start reworking the freezer room puzzle to be more threatening, and add a survival challenge to the spider room. Afterwards, perhaps, we may start working on a chess puzzle, however for the presentation next week, we might not have much more than we have today, but the spider room should be a good addition.

As the assets are nearly read for this, we may also work on a small gallery puzzle. We have decided for now that the end of the game should simply be the discovery of Eurydice's ghost, and Orpheus' displeasure at the Player breaking into that room.

Bugfixes, bug fixes and more bug fixes.

3rd of March 2017

It is time to get the game ready for its first proper playtest. I wrote up a questionnaire for our playtesters to fill out, and we made a to-do list to check what needed to be done before we could reasonably present the game to people.

Playing through the game a few times ourselves threw up several bugs, issues, and confusions that we aimed to fix this week. There was a lot to do, and we got a lot of things fixed, but of course because of this focus, there is little new content. At this stage we realize that we will not be able to produce many more rooms and make the game smooth at the same time. We will hence first prioritize getting the game as bugfree and playable as possible, and then sort out narrative progression so there is a distinct beginning and end.

There are still a few rooms we do want to implement, like a chess puzzle perhaps, but there will not be a lot more gameplay at this stage. I become less active when it comes to bug fixes, because Cian is the far superior coder. Here are a few issues we adressed this week.

Cian did:

- sort out the stages properly, so Orpheus will be in different positions throughout the narrative
- Orpheus can now iterate in dialogue, so he has more than one line of conversation per stage.
- he restricted the interaction animation for the player to only interactable things.
- dialogue triggers to be set for stages, to assist with narrative progression.
- he fixed the stairs warp, so going upstairs works on a seperate warp script now and the player will spawn to the right position.

- attempted to make the toolshet mirror puzzle work. We ran into several issues with this. The line-cast render caused terrible performance issues, and there is a bug where the light will just vanish into the distance that he hasn't been able to fix as of yet. The puzzle is currently a little too easy, and so we are not sure how much attention we should give it.



I did:

- coded in interaction animations
- coded in Masie, the pet spider, to eat the meat that the player can place in her foot bowl.
- a set endstage for the library that allows web to disappear permanently and books to be read.
- a blue book that can be picked up in the library.
- designed a pantry and spider room.
- redesigned the basement door leading to the underworld.
- created a basic main menu with credits and access to game and exit.
- added sound effects and updated the dialogue
- coded and designed a pause menu that lets the player go back to the main menu, resume, or exit the game.

Dialogue Overhaul and flourish

This week may have been our slowest week so far. Or perhaps it simply felt like that because we focused on overhauling the dialogue system to allow us to include portraits and name boxes.  That, along with bug fixes, took us about half the week.

I added a fair bit of flourish to the rooms, more interactions, sound effects and decorations, and we worked on the narrative progression of the game so objectives are now a little clearer.

After waking up, the player can now progress into the empty mainhall, where he will muse about finding matches. Upon finding the matches in the supply room, he can light the fire and find Orpheus in the center of the house, who will order him to turn on the fusebox in the basement. Once that is done, the lights in the hallways will turn on and the whole house will be brighter.

I created assets for a future potential gallery puzzle, as well as the spider room that has been in the works for a while. I also styled the pantry from where the spider's food can be picked up later, and drew up one portrait for each character to use in the new dialogue system. The ghost wife now has an idle animation.

I fixed the bathtub in the bathroom to be animated as well, and started setting up triggers in all rooms to further the narrative and give important puzzle clues. We have a problem with the trigger dialogue however, as turning a trigger box off permanetly will turn off all others. They all share the same script. Cian has been working on that today and is still looking for a solution.

More layout additions, sprites, bugfixing

Today and yesterday we enhanced the house with some more rooms and items.
I restyled the spider-combat room to look more like a library.
I styled a supply room, where the player will be able to pick up matches as his first item.
I added nameplates to each room so that player navigation will be easier. Luckily, this can easily be supported by the narrative of the game as well.

I created a bathtub for the bathroom, including animations that don't quite work yet in terms of coded interaction, and I created my probably most complicated and best sprite yet: the grandpiano for the living room.

I also styled the basement and linked it up to the main house, so the dark room is accessible once more.
Cian fixed the issues with the inventory system, so everything works smoothly again.

We also finally fixed the sprite overlap issue, so the player cna now step infront and behind objects and will render correctly! I used a script I had looked at a long time ago for this, and after some fussing around with it, Cian rightly identified that we only needed to change part of it to an update function, and voila!

Cian has been working on the prototype for the next puzzle. The assets for that are already created and just need plugging into the game. In terms of space and design, the house and the game are really coming together. The navigation and exploration of the house itself is also adding a lot of content that can be nicely detailed and flourished.

Soon we will be looking into a different dialogue system so that we can include nameboxes and portraits during character dialogue. Hopefully this way, we can streamline the narrative and better portray the relationship between the characters. We felt it disingenious to simply have Orpheus write out how the player was meant to be feeling, whilst the player was projecting himself onto a mute, blank slate character.

Here are some screenshots for today's and yesterday's work.

14th of February, Creation of House Layout

A fair few things got done today and yesterday that really helped bring together what we had so far.

On monday, I mapped out the basic house layout in a new scene, adding hallways and staircases to link the house together from the servant room to the living room. Today, this static layout got styled further, and is now decorated with banners, wooden beams and pillars.

It also features a decorated entrance door and area, as well as an upstairs that can't quite be reached yet.

Cian fixed the warp around so that doors have to be interacted with for the player to enter a new area, and he made it so that when they exited a room, they would be back in the right place within the halls. Thanks to that, we could link all our rooms into the layout today, meaning they are accessible to the player from the start.

We fixed the issue with players still being able to move when the textbox was up, so dialogue now freezes the character. I also quickly made a prefab for triggered dialogue, so some clues can be given when entering a new room.

Yesterday evening, I drew up some sinks and dripping water animations, because Cian finished the prototype for a faucet puzzle yesterday. This is now all styled and fully playable, with lovely dripping water sound effects. 

Cian also made the inventory static, and after some discussion we did figure out a way to make it so that even when holding an item, basic objects can still be interacted with. Now the player can pick the duster up in a cleaning cupboard rather than in the library. 

I found a new side for sound effects that we can use under creative commons attribution 4.0 mostly. That site is orangefreesounds.com. I got a range of lovely creepy background sounds from there, as well as some classical music and background music tracks. 

I adapted some of the sound in the start room to work better.

In terms of assets, what's new? Pillars, beams, banners, rugs and sinks, as well as the stairs of course, and the cleaning equipment you can see above. 

10th of February - Initial prototype completion

Today we presented the initial prototype for our project, and as such can proudly proclaim that the first playable build is complete. Thanks to a week of bug fixing and preparing for the presentation, the five-room build is fairly bugfree and two playtesters were able to complete a runthrough without too many problems.

The reaction towards the initial build has so far been positive.

During this recent week, Cian and I did a lot of rethinking of our initial project idea. Whilst we originally wanted to assign one challenge room after the next in randomized, maze like order, we found that playtesters were in agreement that the puzzles felt unconnected and unexplained. They felt that there was no incentive to complete them other than to move on, and that there was little sense in terms of narrative continuity.

After some discussion, we decided that whilst making the house a maze would be technically challenging and interesting, it was not the best choice in terms of game design and user engagement.
A maze would mean that the player has little connection to any specific location in the house, and that puzzles would be unrelated and feel jagged and chaotic at best.

We redesigned the game to work with a static house layout. After waking up in the servant quarters, the player would move through hallways by himself and find the living room, the core of the house, with a hint towards the first puzzle he should undertake. (a single room key, house plan, to-do list, etc.)
The player would then later return to that living room to see it liven up more and more as the game progresses, as well as encountering Orpheus, the master of the house, on each occasion. Orpheus may give him a new task or a piece of information, or offer some advise, or simply company. We want that living room to be a comfortable hub in which house keeping activities truely matter.
So the player can tend to the fire and answer Orpheus' trivial questions whilst receiving orders from hin.

Having a static layout also means that the player will keep inventory items once collected, and so things like the duster can regularly be reused to clean up things around the house.
Puzzles will have to be put into linear order, so the completion of one is necessary to start another.
Now the player can be given an incentive to compelte a puzzle, such as fetching a book from the library overrun with spiders, or fixing the leak in the bathroom in exchange for a favour from Orpheus.
It will also make it far easier to have a linear storyline, with hints properly incorperated into the house and set locations for diary entries and hidden items.

So! Specifically, what have I been up to this week?
Well, aside from creating a screen fader to fade to and from black between levels and fixing some minor bugs, I created an initial living room. The fire can be lit by the player, and will burn down after many seconds to be glowing, and eventually going out entirely. It can then be relit.

The bookshelves in the living room now have descriptions added to them.

I created several pieces of living room furniture, some more paintings and decorations, like candles and a table cloth. I also created another idle animation for Orpheus, so that he may read on one of the sofas.

And, after adding the fire into the build yesterday, I got feedback from two playtesters who kindly looked for bugs and gave us valueable feedback on the process so far. That feedback is already noted down in Evernote, and will be added to a to-do list of bug fixes and adjustments.

Last but not least, we started discussing and putting some thought into the game's narrative background, adding some ideas of notes and diary entries, and explaining the existance of the player housekeeper in the first place. We have planned three more puzzles ahead and will be able to prototype these shortly. Assets will be created alongside the prototypes again. Hopefully, by the next presentation deadline, we will have an extra five rooms. That would be one to two weeks per room.

And hopefully, we will have a nicely flourishing narrative and good dialogue progression with Orpheus, who, as a character, is really starting to connect with the mythology behind his name, so that we are more and more comfortable calling him such.