vivek257

I think that a decent chunk of Game design is about conveying information to the player in as clear and concise a manner as you possibly can. First person stealth presents us with a familiar set of challenges in doing this. The clearer the information, the easier it becomes for the player to navigate the level and make plans. In thief for e.g. the light gem allows the player to determine how visible they are. In graveyard of thieves we used several similar ideas to convey information to the player,

The Proximity Ring:

Whenever the player looks at a patrolling enemy in the game the proximity ring pops up for a short amount of time. It tells the player what the Sight Radius of the enemy is. The proximity ring changes color to yellow when the player is inside the ring and to red when the enemy spots the player.

This feature could probably have been a vision cone instead of what I ended up implementing. It might not be immediately clear to the player that the green circle drawn around the enemy is a sight radius.

Alarms:

There is another pair of indicators that tell the player they have been spotted by the enemy. One is a red exclamation mark above the enemy. The other is an aural cue, you hear an audio clip of the enemy saying that they’ve spotted an intruder.

Again there should probably have been more clarity here, I could have added another audio cue for when the enemy gets suspicious and tries to look for the player. The suspicious state ends up being pretty nebulous because of this lack of feedback. I think I’ll end up putting a question mark above the enemies head eventually to make it clearer that they’re looking for the player.

Gadgets:

There are several gadgets hidden in every level for the player to use. These gadgets enable the player to evade enemies ,avoid detection and solve puzzles.

This was the first game I worked on alone, I learned a lot about systems design in the process, I made a lot of mistakes as well, These posts are an attempt to catalog what I was trying to do and how well I managed to do it.

The game is on Steam Greenlight ! Check it out and vote for it if you like it.