Dev Log #2 (4/18)

Over the last week, I focused on creating a story to base the game on and developing ideas on mechanics to implement. For a previous class, I worked on a game where the player is a first-person character that “inherits” a house from a distant relative. They collect keys to unlock new rooms, moving from the living room to the dining room, then to the kitchen, then the bathroom, and ending in a bedroom. The bedroom unlocks a secret room where the player is killed by an unseen killer. After being killed, the game ends. I did not explore why the player was targeted, who the killer was, or why the player character accepted the offer of the house despite not knowing the relative. The developing story for this game is that the player visits a cabin that they found on an Airbnb-esque vacation rental. I decided on the location of a cabin because of the trope of the “cabin in the woods” in horror movies, such as The Evil Dead and The Cabin in the Woods. The setting is naturally sketchy and unsettling since they are often secluded. The player would be doing small tasks while exploring the cabin, such as unpacking clothes, fixing the fuse box, and locking any entrance points. I want the turning point to be when the player looks for cameras and finds a hidden camera. 

In the last dev log, I played three horror games. With Andy’s Apple Farm and Amanda the Adventurer, they had multiple endings and secrets that were hidden with items and sequences. Some of the secrets were ones I did not encounter during my playthroughs last week. I looked at some secrets/explanation videos and Game Theory videos on the two games. For example, in Andy’s Apple Farm, you have to play the minigames out of order, which is what I did unintentionally, and try to break the game by intentionally losing minigames and going out of the collision bounds to get secret areas and binary codes to decipher. With Amanda the Adventurer, you get new or updated tapes in alternate routes by not following the puzzles and questions. For example, the first puzzle requires the player to bake an apple pie using instructions in the “In the Kitchen” tape with a toy oven. If the player bakes a peach pie, which Amanda’s sidekick Wooly states is his favorite, the player gets an orange bonus tape. If the player pauses the tape and turns on the toy oven, the oven in the tape will catch fire, and the toy oven will have a recipe for meat pie. If the player follows the recipe, an alternate version of the next tape, “In Your Neighborhood”. I am thinking of implementing multiple endings to my game. The default ending would be a “bad ending” that would lead to the player's death. An alternate ending idea would be if the player finds all of the hints about the killer in the house and has the option to leave. Another ending that could be implemented, but I am unsure how to execute, would allow the player to fight the killer.