👻 Devlog #3 — Recent Updates

👻 Recap! 

Greetings once again, fellow undead citizens! We are here to assure you that we are well on our way in the development of Get Out of My House, ensuring both your safety and ours before we let those unwelcomed humans loose on you. 

📌 Week 2 Sprint [Goals and Dues]

Our focus for this week’s sprint is to strive for the functionality of our gameplay mechanics and NPC systems, ensuring that you, pest control workers, can get a feel of your capabilities and skills in your ghostly form. For our development team to truly succeed in understanding and implementing our intended gameplay functionality, we aimed to address and complete the following tasks during this past week:

• Update our GDD
• Polish the Player Controller
• Greybox three levels
• Create the polish and implement the Possession mechanic
• Set up our Light System Prefabs

📄 Updated Documentation [Poppy]

As we were eager to get to the development stage, we have yet to update the GDD to reflect the new mechanics, level, and features we’ve re-designed. Considering the number of changes we made in the past 2 weeks of development, we decided it would be ideal to revise the document to accurately represent the present game direction. We figured this would be especially helpful to set up as a reference point for the whole team and ensure everyone was on the same page regarding project goals. This also helped us contextualize our project scope and gave us a better idea of what features we needed to prioritize our attention to during development. 

By documenting our latest features in the GDD, we realized that there were more concerns surrounding the restoration gameplay than we initially thought. As our game’s primary objective was to scare the humans, we discovered that the restorations did not directly relate to the narrative premise of “exterminating” the humans. Moreover, an additional mechanic meant that we would have more puzzles and gameplay to design for the final product, making the scope even heftier, given that we already planned for three levels to be implemented. 

While it did create a new puzzle-solving avenue, we figured it was best to scrap the restoration gameplay altogether so that we could focus on developing and polishing the core possession and scaring gameplay loop.

💡 Level Greyboxing

Gameplay flow and pathing for all levels have been designed and implemented into the build! We made quick progress, pumping out all three level layouts by the end of our second week of development!

Image 1: Level 1 - The Abandoned Cabin using kitbashed assets

Image 2: Level 2 - The Catacombs using kitbashed assets

Image 3: Level 3 - The Castle using kitbashed assets

🕹️Game Mechanics

The majority of our development this week surrounded getting our foundational systems set up for implementation and level flow! 

👻 Possession and Interactions

Players are now able to possess a variety of objects and environmental props, manipulating their properties by completing interactions to successfully scare the corresponding humans.

With this new puzzle mechanic, we challenge how players think outside the box by assuming the roles of inanimate objects.

GIF 4: Level 3 - Possession mechanic, player is able to possess the soccer ball and travel through small spaces.

GIF 5 & 6: Level 3 - Possession mechanic, player is challenged to think about how size can affect their path of choice.

💡Light System [Lyllyn]

GIF 7: Level 3 - Light barrier, prevents the player from passing through without possessing an object.

The light system is designed to restrict players' movement while not inflicting damage. Light areas pose as a new obstacle for players to navigate their way around, prompting them to think of creative ways to use their possession mechanics to their advantage.

🤝 Ghost Friend Dialogue System [Lin]

GIF 8: Level 1 - Dialogue system, players can talk to ghost NPCs to learn more about their objectives.

As of right now, only the base dialogue system is working, and we intend on continuing towards having this system used as the game’s tutorial. This way, players can learn the controls and mechanics without our developer prompts.

🧍 Trigger Systems [Lin]

GIF 9: Level 1 - Human AI prefab triggering the door animation once they are scared by the player.

Description

⁉️ Conflicts & Concerns

After getting into the workflow of creating our levels, we realized that there were a number of underlying issues that came with our development:

• Outdated Game Design Document - The document’s information was not up to date, and misaligned with the current design direction of the game. This made it difficult to have a reference point to return to at any point during development to confirm or clarify what needs to be implemented into the game. 
• Scope - As creative and conceptually fun as our ideas were, there was simply too much to worry about production-wise. We had to really re-evaluate what was core to the game concept and playthrough experience we were designing for and re-prioritize our task delegation and project focus. As a result, we removed the restoration gameplay altogether to really narrow down our gameplay to just possessing to scare humans, narrowing down our scope as well as the number of mechanics the players need to learn.
• Gameplay - Initially, we designed gameplay around a timer so that players would have to race against the clock and scare all the humans as quickly as they can. However, the system was not very intuitive in informing players how to measure their success, as timer brackets with respective scores did not really mesh well with the puzzle-solving objective of the game. Hence, we decided to pivot by removing the timer altogether, and replace it with a counter UI that displays the number and difficulty of the humans players are tasked with scaring at each level. This way, we hope that players can better understand their objective and gauge the expectations before solving the puzzles.

💬 What’s Next?

As we transition into the next week of development, our focus will shift towards finetuning the gameplay loop and flow of each level, ensuring the puzzle solutions and pathing feel intuitive and comfortable for the player to navigate. The key points of focus for the third week of development are the following features and tasks directed at the player experience:

• Hosting Playtests - Getting feedback on the game mechanic functionality and uncovering outstanding bugs that disrupt the game experience.
• Polishing the Ghost Possession gameplay experience following feedback.
• Tying together all the systems (Possession, Human AI, Triggers) to create a full gameplay loop.
• Adding signifiers, shaders, and sound effects to each mechanic and event triggers
• Staring Scene and modified Score Systems.
• A cutscene introduction that informs the player of the narrative premise and the Ghost Party objective.

The playtests will take the highest priority in this upcoming week, helping us ensure the current state of the game’s mechanics resonates well with our playtesters before proceeding further in development.