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.