Over the past couple of weeks, our team made many changes to our game to improve the overall quality. We spent a lot of time working on fixing bugs to make numerous quality-of-life improvements. We also worked on a lot of changes regarding player guidance; we now make the hints/tutorials show up exactly when a player would need them, instead of giving them a list of controls to read at the beginning of the game. We also changed some props in-game to better align with the level design. The living room has been changed into a home theater, and all of the signs on the doors were remade to fit in better with the environment. We also made a few changes for the enemy; increased the time between the flashlight flickering off, reduced the despawn time to 7 in-game minutes, added loud footstep sounds when the enemy is moving, and greatly slowed the enemy’s initial movement when it spawns behind the player. Next, we added voice acting into the game. We worked with 5 voice actors to create 7 different voices for each of our characters. We created a cutscene to play at the start of the game, to set the scene for the player and show them the backstory. We created a cutscene to play at the end of the game as well. Additionally, we created a 45 second trailer for our game that shows what our game is and why people should play it. Finally, we started work with a musician to create some of the background music for the trailer and more in-game music and sound effects.
We realized that players spend time taking in the level when they first start, so we changed the guidance to be more intuitive for players as they discover the level. We needed to change some props in the level in order to increase the theming of the game. We had elements from previous iterations, where the level was a hospital, and hence changed some props to better fit the theme. Since the living room was very large people did not find it intuitively to be a living room, which led us to restyle it into a home theater. One major issue was that the enemy was too strong and many players were unable to escape it. To fix this, the time between flickers was increased and the enemy’s speed before the player sees it is reduced. Players also found it confusing that the enemy made a ticking sound as clocks in the environment also made the same sound, which is why we gave the enemy heavy footsteps. A heavily requested addition was voice acting, instead of just captions, we have now added this thanks to five amazing voice actors! We added a cutscene to explain the premise of the game as many players wanted to know the story and explanation for why they were in this house. For the next iteration, we plan to focus on polishing and fixing any remaining bugs. We also plan to integrate more music into the game.
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