Room One and Two, Prototypes

22nd of January, 2017

Towards the end of last week, Cian finished prototyping a simple combat room, in which a spider-like creature shoots web balls towards the player. The player can pick up a gun and shoot the monsters when they are in a vulnerable state.

He also prototyped a trap room that shoots spears from the walls when a pressure plate is activated.

For the first room, we needed to find a way to make it more of an interesting puzzle. We decided that the player should remove cobwebs, that would then keep more monsters from spawning. Dusting off bookshelves seemed like a good task for our ghostly house keeper, and hence in theme with the game's background idea. Over the weekend, Cian did some more work towards this concept.

The trap room will easily be finished, but is currently not necessarily a good fit for the running theme of the story. I am not too confident about the dungeony look of the room at the moment, because it simply does not seem to fit into the mansion logically and looks qutie bare with its stone walls.

I styled both rooms, and prepared the assets to continue with a light-flickering puzzle for next week. This needed mostly a broken fusebox for the player to repair or reset, as well as lightbulbs which were already prepared. I also finished some more furniture assets to improve the existing rooms and prepare us for the start-room, the servants quarters.

Player walk and idle animations are now finished and imported into the game, and for now, placeholder-music from bensound.com has been added to one of the rooms.

First combat room with
revolver on the table, and a spider
shooting webs at the player.

A potential trap room, pressure plates activate spears that fly from the walls. The blood indicates that there might be danger.

After speaking to some of our lecturers, we are still happy to continue on with this idea. One major concern is a unique selling point, however. We find the idea of a shifting mansion with randomly allocated rooms quite interesting, but this is currently a stretch goal and does not provide the innovation we should perhaps be looking for.

Ideally, we would come up with an interesting mechanic that feeds into most of the puzzles and thematically ties the rooms together better, or alternatively make the shifting of the house into a mechanic on its own. This still needs some consideration. Following Jim's advise, we won't be slowed down in our progress right now by overthinking our USP - for now we must be able to present a working prototype with a few playable rooms for our first presentation in 2-3 weeks. 

For this, we hope to present the starting room, a combat room, a puzzle room, a mystery and a survival room in linear progression. We are so far well on track to achievethis goal.