It was my intention to tackle designing the game in stages. First I needed to have the stages in place, and mapping those took quite a large amount of time. In fact this intro demo quickly grew larger than I'd ever anticipated.
However, with the mapping done came the question of how to tackle the next phases of the game.
First I worked on 'flavor'. Flavor is what you read when you examine a bookshelf or a chair. Sometimes you'll find items, but in many games you get a generic "there's nothing important here" or "the bookshelf is empty". I decided to take a different route. Inspired by games like Monkey Island and Tex Murphy, in which you could make unique observations of almost everything in the game, I've spent considerable time writing flavor. Few items in the first demo have the same description twice. This encourages exploration, which is important, because exploring is what will earn you your keys and passwords to proceed through the house.
Second was the actual process of developing locked doors and the appropriate keys. Now, this is my first game so I don't expect to be an expert, but this is also the first stage, so there's a lot of trial and error involved. However, to this point I've developed a number of name and number entry puzzles based on simple arithmetic and reading passages. There's also one fairly obscure riddle. Then of course there are the inventory based puzzles requiring you to obtain several items, combine them and in turn create new items that can help you open doors or obtain other objects.
What I've done little work on so far are the 'stress circumstances' and ghostly encounters. Those will wait until last, after the puzzle work and plotting is done. I want them to fit naturally into the story and not just be RANDOM ENCOUNTER SCARE GO. They'll be there, though. I've already mapped out several places where you can restore some of your sanity after these encounters and have at least two stress circumstances mapped in, but there will be more.
Once that is all done I'll map out the final few cutscenes, package the demo and upload it right here. So let's keep our fingers crossed that I can get it out sooner rather than later. I want feedback as soon as I can get it.
