This week most of our changes were to our enemy as we completely overhauled how the enemy behaves. Instead of having our enemy randomly spawn and chase the player, in this iteration the spawn is less randomized and the enemy can only move when the player isn’t looking at it. When the enemy sees the player, it causes the player to start hearing strange distorted noises, and their flashlight starts to flicker as well. As the enemy gets closer to them, the player starts losing some of their vision and the ominous ticking sound coming from the enemy speeds up-- just like their impending doom. We also included a few changes to our level design-- choosing to theme it around a large mansion instead of an abandoned hospital. Finally, we tweaked a few things in order to improve the quality of life for the player. These changes include: adding a volume adjuster, making it clearer when the player is going to unlock a door, and letting the player collect multiple pages of notes.
We made the changes to the enemy for a few reasons. We felt that our enemy was very cheesy, especially the animations, and that it was extremely buggy when it tried navigating our level. We thought an interesting way to work around this would be to make it so the player doesn’t actually see the enemy while it’s moving. This also adds more interesting decisions for the player as they must choose to look at, run from, or hide from the enemy, or some combination of the three. Our other changes were based on the gameplay feedback that we received as we saw how players interacted with the level. Next week, we plan to focus on adding some more juice to our level by collaborating with voice actors, which will help our game’s plot development immensely, since the storyline is focused on a group of people. We want to work on making more landmarks and unique decorations in the different rooms of our level, so that the player can distinguish between each room in a way that feels natural. We also will most likely end up working on the enemy behavior based on what new information our playtesters reveal.
