Alpha Build 2.0


PLAYER EXPERIENCE GOALS

Art
How does the lighting influence the game's mood? ______ The lighting's effect on the game's mood and environment changes depending on its color and intensity - cooler toned and harsh light increases the sense of unease and stress whilst the warmer, softer lights guide the character and give them moments of relief.

Design 

What is an essential component of the game's experience? _________ The completion of various puzzles and successfully creating or finding the correct path to reach your goal. An underlying sense of unease is also essential.

Game play

How can I find the right balance between too simple and too complex for the in-game puzzles? ________________

Copious amounts of play-testing will be required to make sure that the puzzles are intuitive and relatively easy, whilst also requiring some level of forethought to complete. I want the game to be fun and challenging without being exasperating.

Get Night Plight

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

I think focusing complexity on the areas and items that lead the character through game play is key. Everything else could be simplified. I was so shocked in the reveal of the room when coming from behind the dresser and i think thats a very successful aspect of the game! 

With such an open space though its hard to navigate and figure out which direction I should go and which areas are intended to be explored and which should not. The area in front of the doll house is a bit over loaded and I do think it's a great idea to diclutter it just a little bit. I found myself having to jump through the area and wasn't able to do much walking. This could be solved by giving the character a gliding jump since she has wings so that the player and do navigation from above the plane.  That could also asist in game navigation as well. 


As for the lighting I don't think there enough variation to get any feelings from it. Finding the warm night like doesn't have a reward and being the the cooler light doesnt have a consequence so all in all it doesnt have much impact. I think in order to convey the feelings you're going for you would need to add music/sound effects and then the consequences/rewardds i mentioned earlier. 

All in all it's looking awesome! It's crazy how much you've gotten done on your own! good job! 

I really like how the environment is coming together! It really succeeds in making you feel like you're in a toy story-like setting. I know your original idea was for it to be a maze but I currently get the feeling that it is more sand box like and I am not really sure what my objectives are. I also noticed some of the large environment assets were missing collision.

I'm not sure if it's the settings for the graphics here, but, the textures seem a little on the low res end of things. If this is intended, I would find a way to play with scale a little bit. 

I really enjoy the world building here, but, one major area of issue I am having is navigating. At the beginning it is made quite clear how I progress, you give me just enough information to move forward. Once I clear the ball I am excited/overwhelmed within the first few seconds of moving. The invisible barrier is actually a bummer to find so often, part of this is, the path is unclear, so I just run into it quite a bit. A solution is using props/color to guide our eye. Similar textured props with colorful elements can be grouped to create a visual map.

Now for addressing the question of puzzles. Try to create a simple map of your level top down, and, address your puzzle making in phases of difficulty. 

1st phase - easy - push block, climb over, push ball remove barrier

2nd phase - medium level of difficulty - do we push and STACK things? This would challenge how we climb and find our pushable items and how we line up the drop to stack.

3rd Phase - limited items pushed into place and timed jumping. 

These are just some possible physics based mechanics that are simple yet effective.

Great work thus far!