Hello Everyone and welcome to the development log for the game Menacing Mansion! My name is Justin Amian and I’m excited to share all the work that’s being created for our game. Our development team is composed of ten members and the direction of the game is led by our Lead Designer Cody Philbrook. If you’d like to read more about design decisions for the game feel free to check out his design post here! 

Menacing Mansion is a horror game that uses a procedurally generated maze to create a different experience with every play through. You play as Paschal, who has been left a mansion after the mysterious disappearance of her relatives. Curious about their disappearance you explore the mansion looking for answers hidden in the rooms and hallways. Exploring the mansion will subject you to scare events and monsters that roam the grounds. As you gather items left throughout the rooms you will find a key that will open a door to the terrifying poltergeist that has left a curse upon the mansion. Defeating it will uncover the answers you seek and weaken the mansion's curse. 

Now that you’ve learned a little about the game, let's discuss the progress we’ve made during this sprint!

Modeling:

Our Lead Designer Cody has chosen an Edwardian era aesthetic for the mansion. While this aesthetic can be challenging our 3D modelers have made some amazing pieces to fill the rooms of the mansion with. One of the difficulties with using a procedurally generated maze has been how do we make each room feel different to the player. In order to help each room feel different every prop created by our modelers has multiple texture variations. When rooms are generated a texture for each prop will be randomly assigned which should give the player a sense that the rooms are different. With the variety of rooms that will fill the mazes our modelers have a multitude of props they will be modeling throughout the development process. Below are some examples of the amazing props our modeling team have created!

Level Design:

The level designers are presented with an interesting challenge with Menacing Mansion. Procedurally generating a maze for the player to explore requires specific room types and layouts. To make the maze function properly and allow for the doors to be connected we have a total of five different configurations for each room. So while each room will have a theme our level designers need to make five different layouts for the same themed room with different door configurations. While challenging our level designers have been able to make some amazing annotated maps for each room. Here are the annotated maps for the wine cellar that can be found in the maze.

Programming:

We’ve asked our programming team to accomplish some very difficult tasks in a very limited production time frame. But they have met this challenge and delivered amazing results. One of Menacing Mansions core features is a procedurally generated maze that provides the player a different experience each time they play. For this first sprint this was a feature we needed to make sure would work to create the game our designer envisioned. The programming team made some significant progress to the procedural generation system and were able to create a working maze generator, as shown in the gif.

Once the maze generation was completed the programming team began working on a dash system for monster and scare events that will be scattered throughout the maze. As players explore the maze we will have events and monsters that can rapidly move toward the player to scare them. The programming team was able to complete a dash system which will allow our level designers to place scare events throughout the rooms!     

Conclusion:

During this Sprint our team was assigned a total of 119 user stories and were able to complete 85 user stories. For our next Sprint our goal is to have a playable demo featuring many of our core game mechanics! Going forward we’re going to be creating many more props, creating annotated maps for all the rooms and adding more features to the procedural generation. The development team would like to thank you for viewing our page as we begin development of our game. Look forward to more posts about the development and design of Menacing Mansion!