It’s been a long, busy day, but we’ve made lots of progress! The fact that I’m just now getting around to writing our Day 2 summary well into Day 3 speaks volumes about our efforts.
Our main goal for today (yesterday) was to get a basic Alpha build up and running; all of the core gameplay elements without any of the bells and whistles. I’m happy to report that we were able to get that and then some.
Most of the gameplay takes place at the entrance to a creepy house in the middle of the night. In order to create a more immersive experience, the game takes place in first person. We wanted to use depth and perspective to help establish a sense of place in the scene, but none of us are actually 3D artists. We came up with the idea to just use a set of 2D assets, a bit of parallax, and a couple of simple textured cube mesh doors to achieve a somewhat pseudo 3D effect. I think what we came up with looks pretty nice!
The house’s interior is just a flat quad behind the front of the door, but the difference in depth creates a nice parallax effect and makes the room feel bigger than it actually is.
In addition to the art assets, we have a nice suite of really creepy ambient and effect sounds ready to go. Our plan is to play around with 3D positioning of the sounds that play so that you feel like you’re really in the middle of a tense situation. We may have to add a splash screen after the title card that recommends using headphones!
After knocking out our core gameplay, we finally got to work on fleshing out the storyboards for our ending sequences. If we’re able to do all of the work we have planned, there will be six different endings. The ending the player gets is determined by their performance and we’re hoping to have some really interesting sequences play out. Currently, this is our top pick for points to expand on. If we have some extra time at the end of the project (yeah, right) we’ll probably put some time into a few extra endings.
Storyboard sketch for one of our game’s endings…
Hopefully we have the time to actually get these in.
Sunday will be mostly about trying to wrap things up. Our biggest tasks will be getting the ambient sound placement working, and implementing our ending sequences. If all goes well, we may even have the game posted to the site at the end of the night for everyone to play! For now, I’m gonna crash so I can get up in a couple of hours and do this all over again… Almost there!
The sample you have here looks very good for 2D assets. I am surprised that you went first person for you point of view, but it looks like it fits perfectly for your game. I cant wait to see the end result.