Greetings once again Indie/ModDB! This past week has been FULL of interesting things for me from a development standpoint. Conceptually, there are two major things I'm trying hard to take into consideration with every new puzzle/area that I create:
1. Does this make sense and progress the story?
2. Am I trying to pander to people who are not bipolar?
The answer to 1 should be yes. The answer to 2 should be no. I've officially decided that this game will be very difficult... for anyone who does not play carefully. I'll be implementing a strict save system (not death=start over from the beginning, but still strict) and most puzzle failures will result in a game over with no retries. This will give the player an incentive to get it right the first time (I hope).
In addition, some of the puzzles themselves will require some odd ways of thinking. By that, I don't mean different lines of logical thought, I mean thinking illogically. It is common knowledge that sufferers of bipolar experience periods of depression and mania, but it is not commonly known that this is also often accompanied by confused thinking and reasoning. I am trying to incorporate that into the puzzles (after all, we are inside the head of Troy, who is suffering from bipolar) while also hiding the answers in places where observant players will be able find them.
In other news, I've been screen-recording a lot of my work lately just for my own purposes, but I thought I'd share just a segment of it that I cut out of a section I'm currently working on. It's still early, of course, but all the elements necessary to solve the puzzle are in place and now I'm just finishing up the level design and pacing. Check it out:
On Youtube - Youtube.com
The music playing in the background there is a little piece by my friend 1u+2d! You can listen to it here:
For the coming week, my goal is to finish the Grey Room area and start touching on polishing and optimizing the areas I've already created. I want this game to look a cut above some other indie horror games while still being playable by the majority of PC gamers. I figure starting optimization during development is probably better than after.
Thank you all for your interest and support! Have a wonderful evening! :)
