Next Steps

I have been taking a moment to figure out what to focus on next.

Since the idea is to capture the feeling of an old survival horror, I set on studying the originals to understand more about their core design ideas.

I was searching google trying to find anything about this when I bumped into this article. 

It’s a study on the level design of the first Resident Evil (yes, such things exist) where, among lots of other stuff, it is mentioned that the core of the experience consists in “moving back and forth between rooms as items are collected and puzzles are solved, and eventually passing into areas with entirely new rooms”.

Duh.

But, doesn’t it help to read it out? Simple, bare bone. Stripped of all else, that’s the way the whole mansion unfolds.

I want to make a proof of concept of that: a small, self-contained level with a good pace.

You can see that in my notes -besides a very friendly reminder to my ambitious brain- I am mentioning an “enderman”. I’m not talking Minecraft. I call Enderman that guy. The one -invincible or almost invincible- that is present in 90% horrors out there. He chases you around the map and punishes you if he finds you. Ender man. The man that ends you, I guess?

Basically it's what Tomb Raider 2’s butler evolved into. If only he knew...

The idea is for the level to unfold like this: you start in a single room and you can't go anywhere else; you need to find something right where you are to unlock the next section. Then you access to the next 3 rooms. Once these are “completed” you get to explore yet another 3: here the enderman awaits.

The whole thing basically leads the player in a loop around the 2 floors of this section of my mansion.

I made some very simple maps to help designing the space.

Living Room. I have no idea why I felt the urge to name only that room and not the rest. Maybe that's a subconscious homage to my best friend, the couch.

Deadline

I still want to have a deadline so that I am forced to focus. I usually take 14 days for these challenges but since I will be traveling for a week soon, I will set the deadline for Monday 6th November. That gives me 14 available days in total, just not consecutive.

Until now, I have sketched out the map and started laying out some props, to start getting a feel for the space.

Other stuff that I have worked on recently

Besides figuring out a decent objective for the next steps, I have also worked on improving my framework with a few things like:

Patrol Path-Based AI. A simple system that allows me to draw a path in the world and then tell an AI to follow that. Simple and more organized than the previous “pick a random point”.

New Doors. I never liked the feel of the doors, the way they opened. They were very arcade-y and more Half Life-like than what would be suitable for a survival game. I reworked the system to give them a nice smooth opening animation of which I can tweak the duration. By default, I’ve made them slower, which helps a more paced gameplay where each new room feels more like a new -self-contained- environment rather than just a continuation of the same space. Resident Evil (but also Silent Hill) had this system that would signal with a specific color which rooms were “completed” (which meant basically you found everything there was to find there). That gives a nice little insight in how designers were thinking about the map and confirms the idea above.

Also this sort of slow opening sequence is another homage to the iconic RE door opening animation.

Item inspection.  I always loved that moment in more recent REs where you are rotating an object in search of a key glued somewhere on the back. Being able to inspect objects by physically rotating them on all sides adds a lot to the immersion and I would love to experiment with that. So I added a simple system to support it.

I will try to include something that uses this in the next release.

Interaction system. More of a quality of life improvement: finally I added support for swapping interaction options directly in the editor as a designer without doing hacky stuff. Now I can add any option I want to any object and switch between them at will, being sure that I won't break something in the process. Like a door will transition from “Use Item” to “Open/Close” once the right key has been used on it.

And that's about it for now.
Until the next update.