Projects - Sisters #2

It's been only a week since my last post and it's crazy how so much have happened in a so short period of time. This week I dedicated most of my free time discussing ideas and trying to implement and make them work on Sisters.

It all began with a gameplay video Hamenopi made of Sisters. I couldn't imagine how awesome and helpful it would be for me to watch a video of someone playing my game. It helped me A LOT to realize things that I would never figure out by myself.

I test the game countless times a day, but it's nothing compared to someone who's not familiarized with your code and doesn't even know the game map. Every time I play the game, I go strictly to the point I want to test and do the exact correct action expected. I made a secret door, of course I know where it is and how I activate it, but... is the trigger on a good spot? How do I expect players to know why is that door opening? From what I experienced, you can just smash the buttons searching for the switch and if you are lucky enough you will find it. The same can be applied for the puzzles and riddles, if I make a puzzle that can be solved based on luck, how would the player know he solved it?

So I spent some time reworking trigger ranges, doors colliders, general objects positioning, basically everything I wanted to be easy to find and easy to interact with.

 

Those were some of the points made regarding the game design after watching the gameplay video and talking to some friends. I'll talk of each major change individually, to explain in detail what's going on.

An important topic to talk about is the change of the player's only tool to light the way, the torch. I don't know why it took me so long to realize the torch wasn't a good element inside the game, I was carrying this burden and didn't even know why.

Firstly, the torch was using 1/3 of the screen to nonstop render a flame animation right in front of the main camera. This is terrible for performance, screen visualization, lighting, damn.. so many bad things I can think of.

Secondly, I don't need to work on the wooden grip animation anymore, I tried improving that, but the transitions between idle and sprint animations were really bad. Also, that torch had a magic switch where you could light it up from nothing, so realistic..

Thirdly, why would someone use a torch when there is a lamp post pretty much anywhere? A flashlight makes much more sense. The torch would've been a good thing if there were no electricity, or if the game were medieval, I mean, some specific cases where there is no other option.

The fourthly and last reason, the flashlight helps a lot on the jump scare factor. The vision angle is almost half than before, you can only see the center of the screen, your sideways are very dark and mysterious. The sight distance is much higher, good for map exploring and gameplay in general. Both of them combined are perfect to build a suspense atmosphere.

I think I can go on with this forever, but I'm done talking about it, goodbye old torch.

Flashlight effects - Sister's in-game screenshot

I've made some updates on the Sister's AI too, always increasing the random factor. I want to get to a point where even I, the creator of them, get unexpectedly caught and scared. I must admit it happened few times already.

It was a calm and warm night, I was casually play-testing something and totally forgot about the Sisters, then, the inevitable happens, "Hm... maybe I should move this door a bit to the riOMFG!!!".....Out of nowhere she appeared, I don't know how I didn't see that one coming. 

"I'm not touching your code tonight" Yes, I grounded them for the night.

Anyway, back to updates. I started working on some puzzles and riddles, developing some ideas that will make the game more interesting, especially when talking about replay value.

My game is considerably short, therefore I want to make something you can replay and still have fun. To do such, I will be working on several puzzles solutions, their results can be combined in order to generate an alternative ending or path.

THeRe Is no Good way - can you solve this mini riddle ?

I consider events that get triggered considering your past decisions a very good technique to make a game not linear, 'replayable'. People can play the same game over and over again just to see what happens if he chooses another way, especially when talking about a short game. If I really decide to go down this road, I'll need a lot of inspiration and storytelling skills. Soon enough I'll be on vacation and have plenty of time to study and develop this idea. 

I'm working on a friend's suggestion on sanity regeneration. After some discussions on the matter, I decided to try and implement it. The main idea is to create a sanity source. While the player is close to it, he regenerates sanity faster. The source would be located on a corner of the map, away from the game dangers.. The end-game areas are far away from the source, therefore, less affected by the sanity regeneration multiplier, making it progressively harder as you explore and progress.
The visual representation of the sanity source can be anything that reminds the player of something good, currently I'm starting to build a lighthouse, but it's not definitive yet.

There are also some minor changes that I won't get into much detail. The in-game menu is improved, game pauses when it is opened and some options are now available, like mouse sensitivity and sound volume. The remaining changes are all inside the game code, some tweaks and little adjustments.

I also started working on a game opening scene and a splash screen with my logo, unfortunately my insane Photoshop & Blender skills makes me very limited on this subject.

Cup of coffee for the splash screen - made on Blender

The original idea was to make a hot cup of coffee, which represents the Java language and of course, coffee. The cup holder forms the letter 'P', my initial. I have some ideas to make it better, but my lack of skills and knowledge won't let me, at least for now.

I'd like to sincerely thank those who are helping me and contributing in some way. This keeps me motivated and hopefully I won't disappoint you.

If you have any feedback, please contact me.

I don't have any website to host my game, so my only option is to upload it on my dropbox, I guarantee it's completely safe to download but I will find a better way as soon as I can.

Link to download the latest playable version of the game:

Download Sisters (for Windows)
Download Sisters (for Linux)

Keep in mind that the game is still under development, so there will be bugs. Read 'readme.txt' file before playing for more info.

Projects - Sisters #1

I was planning on making posts on a chronological order, but then I thought of something. It's interesting that before making posts about my old projects, I write this one about my current project. The reason is that everything is still fresh in my head and I can document easier. I'm having some trouble trying to remind the problems I ran into on my old projects since it's been some time and they are on stand-by now. I'll need to do some digging on old codes and specially more time to write those posts. Maybe it's better if I go reverse and talk about recent stuff before the old ones.  

That being said, I have a couple of projects I'm working on right now, the main one is the game Sisters.

Sisters is a psychological horror game where you play a defenceless character haunted by two sisters, as the name sugests. The place where it happens is an abandoned area containing a house and a small cemetery with a chapel, I still have 3/4 left of the map to do, but this is what I have so far.

The game storyline still a mystery, I have some ideas but there is no mention of story inside the game yet. I will work on an opening scene explaining the beginning, then as the player progress through the game the story will start making sense and the pieces of puzzles will fit together. 

The game doesn't have an objective yet, it will come along with the story, but I decided to go with puzzle solving kind of goal.

Main menu - Sisters

I've been reading a lot of articles and forums about horror games, I learnt a lot on some of those articles and decided to make some changes on my project. I'm adding some components that I find crucial for game immersion and connection between player and character, some of them are listed below.

The User Interface(UI) - on a previous version of the game, there was a stamina and sanity bar on the screen, the user could always check his stats by looking at the bars. This is not interesting on a horror game, it breaks the virtual reality immersion. So I removed those and instead of vision representation I might add sound response (heartbeats acceleration, breath change, vision blur, camera shake, etc). I realized that if the player only needs to pay attention to the game scene, I will need to work hard on the environment and graphics stuff, to make up for the lack of UI.

You go first.. - in-game screenshot

Another factor that I consider important is the intuitive and easy control commands of the character, so the player doesn't have to think of which button to press. From the moment that the player looks at his keyboard to interact with something, the connection is instantly broken, he gets out of the game atmosphere and back to real life, also not acceptable on a horror game. 

Finally, and the one I'm struggling most to learn, is the frequency which scary events happen. By scary events I mean jump scares, loud sounds and surprise events in general. I was reading this article and came across a quote:

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." - Alfred Hitchcock

I realized this is the core of psychological horror, the main idea is build a tense atmosphere where the player's attention is raised at it's maximum level until you finally scare him. That's why is so important to dose correctly the frequency jump scares happen, if the player sees a sister too often, he will eventually get used to it and won't scare him anymore. However, if he doesn't see her at all, he will get comfortable with the suspense atmosphere, neither can happen. It needs to be balanced, so what's coming will always be unexpected.

I believe that if I follow the concepts mentioned above and dose the elements correctly, I can make a good horror game in the end.    

Link to download the latest playable version of the game:

Download Sisters (for Windows)

Keep in mind that is still under development, so there will be lots of bugs. Read 'readme.txt' file for more info.