It’s an old-school type of game. I’m used to contra 3, chrono trigger and so on.
For a jam I made the quick choice of making the main goal of the game being run away.
Since your goal is to escape then your task is to find out what’s the tools you might find in the small environment that can make you escape the area. I made the spawn point strategic for both player and AI.
The player spawns near the safe and the kitchen; In a way it provide both the starting point and the ending points; To reforce this idea I made all the AI push forward against the player, meaning your only way around is to went into the kitchen and maybe quickly find tools over there. But the AI will also push you out of there, making the kitchen a good start but not a “safe place”.
For the safe room(a place where the player can hide) I made a bedroom. The idea is that once you hide there you will casually notice the AI pattern. You will figure that switching lights will also slow the AI down, making you win a bit of time and even escape easily after that (to match the theme, you got to be unseen to escape). There’s 2 rooms next to the bedroom. One has a passcode and the other seems “useless”. If you pick the fork you might aswell try the 3rd room and find out the “cool” option: Unlock.
Once you unlock the door you might as well look for tools; Over there your might find a sheet of paper with a pair of passcodes.
This passcode match the puzzle on the room next to it where the guard walks around in a loop (This is the time the player must use the environment into his advantage by switching the lights off the most it can). All the rest should be self explanatory by taking all the previous knowledge into account. All the rest is unlock passcodes and even find the hidden item: A bomb.
I really intended not to explain anything for the players cause I believed that the game would be self explanatory once the players has in mind “escape the hotel” and “switching off”, which should “enlight” the exploration into the map. This is going to be a bigger game but once I made this “demo” I didn’t intended to “explain” things since it wasn’t meant to be the final version for this game (not just because of jam time but because I had and have more plans for this project).