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.
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