Day 7, Success!
Another year, another 7DRL. 14 of them now. Play it now here!
You are a Real State agent who visits an old abandoned mansion to assess its market value and put it on sale, but when you are inside, checking some of its ancient artifacts, you pass out and wake up in a room…. what surprises await for you in the mansion? Every time you play there will be a new adventure!
Credits
- Design, Code and Integration by Santiago Zapata
- Game Art by Giovanny Ramirez
- Cutscenes by Bombillo Amarillo
- Ambient Music and Sound Effects by Ashton Morris
I was only able to fit less than 2 hours on the final day (!). During the day I precompiled the list of things to be done in my head, to make the most of out the limited time I knew I would have. Here’s what I did during that final push:
- Integrate the walking animation for the main character (!)
- Add ambient music
- Add doors opening SFX
- Add intro sequence
- Add endgame image and logic control.
- Add losing condition (time limit, 20 minutes)
- Fix issue with conflicting camera fades
- Add instructions
As you can see, all of it was polishing, no new game content but I think it was worth it to provide a better end product.
I’m happy with the results this time. Following are the things I wish I could have included:
- Slightly more elaborate puzzles: I wasn’t aiming for very complex puzzles, but hoped for more than just keys + doors.
- Descriptions for objects in the mansion, including tying them to the (generated) history of the inhabitants.
- More furniture and room types: Especially the beds, bathtubs, toilets and dining tables. I got some of them from Giovanny late on Sunday but it was too late to include.
- A real mansion layout generator: A higher level generator which could decide the room types and positioning based on a general mansion pattern. (Sadly, right now rooms types are just randomly chosen).
- Footsteps SFX: Time was running out and I couldn’t figure out a 5 minutes solution for this so had to leave it out.
- Rooms of variable size with scrolling: Will probably require some tweaking to the engine since som many things are tied to the fixed size (had to do it because of the jam constraints)
- Animations of the character walking up and down and a better walking animation.
On the other hand, this is a list of things I was very happy to achieve:
- Setting the mood of the game, with the in-game art and the color palettes, as well as the awesome ambient track and SFXs and the intro scenes.
- The engine for mansion exploration including item management (sadly couldn’t exploit it more)
- The mansion layout generator, and tying it the engine which included transforming the 2D map into a logic structure.
- The room generator which managed to create somewhat believable mansion rooms (and was pretty polished)
So far, only a couple bugs have been reported (and none of them seems to be a extreme blocker) which is good:
- Sometimes you can escape the boundaries of reality and walk thru the background of the room
- In some contexts, the game runs too slow. (Still trying to find out the causes)
I consider this is a complete game (go ahead and try to escape the mansion!), however I believe there’s potential to continue working on it. Here are some ideas I’m thinking on working on besides the ones already mentioned above (I’ll likely write a longer post about it in the future):
- Multiple stories mansion: Stairways, balconies, towers.
- Multiple ways to die.
- Separate look and use commands.
- NPCs lying around giving you info and driving the plot.
- Scary moments!
- Hidden rooms.
- More!
Time invested: 30:31