Lead Designer Blogpost 5

        Hello all, Cody Philbrook here to talk about build 3 of Menacing Mansion and the design  work that I have put in. If you are interested in the work that the team is doing please check out my producer Justin Amian’s blog here. So in our last build we implemented a few different systems: Batteries to give the player a resource to manage, and notes to give the player some form of story. With this recent build I wanted to test if the players were able to find the notes and batteries and if the batteries had enough life in them.

        As I mentioned in the last blogpost we have been toying around with the different size of the maze, In our first build we started off with a 5x5 grid size for maze to populate the path, but because of the size of the map, players were spawning quite close to the final room even finishing the game in as little as 2 rooms. This was not what we had in mind so in build 2 we bumped it up to 7x7. This allowed the player to progress through the maze but unveiled a new issue, the player getting completely lost and not making it to the end. In build 3 our most recent build we reduced the maze to a 6x6, I was hoping that this would be a sweet spot between the two different sizes. 

        As you can see from the charts, a lot of the playtesters didn’t make it to the end of the maze. Now because we added the batteries in this build I believe that a lot of it has to do with the player losing the light and thus not being able to see. So how do I fix this? Players need to be able to explore, manage their supply of batteries, and understand that there is a way that they can escape the maze. In terms of the maze, players need a landmark system. In order for players to know that they have been in a part of the maze before, I want to introduce a door system. This will allow players to know that they have gone in a room before. In addition to that system we can implement a lot of different things as it can also act as a trigger for an event. 

        Moving on, the batteries were a very important part of the most recent build but they need to be tweaked so as to enhance game play rather than disrupt it. One simple fix for the next build is to increase the amount of batteries throughout the rooms. Currently we have 31 rooms prefabbed but only 8 of those rooms have a single battery in them. If we increase this so that 15 of those rooms have batteries in them, the player will have a larger supply and should be able to progress to the end of the maze but barely keep their flashlight supplied. Talking with my build engineer I was thinking that we can add a chance script to the batteries so that we can vary the location of the batteries in every room but further testing is required.

        As you can see from the playtest data above players had a hard time finding batteries. In the levels that I designed I had tried placing the batteries in different locations, some near lamps to draw their attention and others in more ambiguous places as you can see from the screenshot below. We need to teach the player early on in the game that their flashlight requires batteries to function properly, that they are able to turn the flashlight off to conserve batteries and that they need to get out of the maze before they run out. . While we want players to run out of batteries in order to build tension we need to balance the amount of batteries in the scene and the length of the maze so that players are able to win but not easily.

        One of the last things that I wanted to start testing was leaving notes for the player throughout the maze in order to give them some story elements as well as assist in building that spooky tension that we have been looking for. I have a lot more ideas that still need to be flushed out but I came up with two short notes about the monster that we will hopefully be getting added to the game. 

         Based on the feedback data that I have collected I noticed that a mix of players found these notes while others didn’t. I believe the solution to this problem is to increase the amount of them throughout the game. There are only currently 3 rooms that have a note placed in them and thus have a very low change of the player discovering them. 

        One of the final things that we were working on that didn’t quite get into the build is the Door and Key system. In order to give the player an end goal and a reason to explore I plan to hide a key in the maze for the player to discover. This will mean that the player will have to survive long enough to find the key and the end of the maze before their battery dies. The next playtest we conduct will be crucial in understanding the amount of time the batteries need to last as well as how long. 

        In conclusion we still have a lot of work to be done before the game is in the state that I want it to be in. That said, our next goal is to get a tutorial put together to add a skill gate for the player so that they learn the basic mechanics of the game and thus have a better understanding of what they are doing once they start going through the maze. I also plan on implementing a bit of UI for the battery so that the player will know how long they have until the flashlight dies. We will continue to tweak the systems that we have currently and get the game in the best shape possible for review.