Post-Mortem: One More Time

It's been more than 6 months since the completion of this game, and despite being made as a simple class assignment, I remain proud of this work. The goal of the class assignment was to create a game that invoked a certain feeling in the player, and the feelings I wanted to capture were tension and fear. During its creation, I ended up very happy with most of the game, especially the visual aesthetic. I was incredibly pleased by how well the whole corn maze looked despite all being the same model and the ground textures being the same texture, just made darker in certain areas. Despite that, due to the Post Process Volume I put in, as well as the fact that the entire game is in the dark, the final result ended up looking very pleasing. Another thing that I was very happy with was the look of the enemy. I was struggling to think of a good design in the limited time I had for it, and so I made it's texture entirely emissive white, which combined with the PPV to make it look like it was made of TV static, a completely unforeseen but very welcome outlook. 

Even though I am very happy with the final game, on a second loop I would make a lot of changes. The biggest is the size of the maze - it takes less than 30 seconds to run from one side of the maze to the other, and that results in a very small area. I would at least double the size of the maze, adding more twists and turns to the path. I would also add props to the maze and maybe a reason to stay on the main path. An easy mechanic that would increase immersion is if the player moves too fast through the corn, the enemy can hear them and goes towards the noise. The enemy had a basic sight sense, and would decently lose sight of you in the maze, but I would want to give it an in-depth sensing system to create more fear for the player.

Overall, I very much enjoyed working on the project and playing the end result. I would also gladly develop it more given the opportunity and make a genuinely scary short experience for players.