This week, our dev team focused on the completion of our mansion and puzzles, the creation of our story and cutscenes, and some thematic/atmospheric tweaks. We have moved on from our original 5 room, 1 floor, milestone scene to a deluxe 2 floor, 8+ room mansion! We have also added some fantastic animations and dialogue to give our game some badly needed exposition.
This update is very feature based and did not significantly alter our existing game mechanics. The reason we made these changes is because we had always planned for a larger house and unordered puzzles in order to give our game an exploratory feel. This seemed impossible in our old, tiny apartment. The puzzles we added are also more interesting and challenging than our original test puzzle. Our animation/dialogue changes stem from the thoughts and complaints of playtesters. Many people who played our game were a bit confused about the story and explanation of our characters. We've certainly tried to clean up a lot of confusion in this update, and we've also given the player some motivation on their puzzling journey.
For our next iteration, we are planning an additional puzzle if gameplay time is too short, and further plot development in our story. We are also planning on gameplay and AI tweaks depending on feedback. Lastly, a lot of work for the beta will probably be bug fixing and game polishing as well.
In the meantime, here are a few shots of our spooky mansion!
