Milestone #2 Devlog

October 3, 2023 - October 11, 2023

This week, we worked on developing the story and level designs for our game, while preparing our game design document. We tried to build on the feedback that we got from the industry experts which was to add some story, or an edge to make the gameplay more unique and less monotonous.

We decided on having three main levels plus a tutorial level. The premise that we finalized is that the player is a photographer who enters a haunted mansion and their empty photo album gets possessed and the slots in the photo album are filled with spectral “phantom photos”. 

Each level will be a room in the haunted mansion and the player will have to take 5 photos in each room, matching the photo prompts and eventually replacing the spectral phantom photos with the real photos that they take. Each room is centred around a specific ghost and will have a unique gameplay twist or mechanic to prevent the gameplay from being too monotonous. After successfully taking a photo and replacing the phantom photo in the album, a photo caption will appear in the album, hinting at more of the ghost’s story.

As we were developing the level designs, we had to ask ourselves important questions including:

• What does the room look like?
• Who is our ghost?
• How did the ghost die?
• What gameplay twist/mechanic are we introducing in this level?
• How do we incorporate this new mechanic into the photo taking?
• How do we tell the ghost’s story through the photo prompts?

Some examples of level design maps:

Accomplishments

• Developed a clear plan for the rest of the game
• Wrote our design document
• Redesigned and modeled a new version of the Painter room
• Implemented an object interaction system
• Added controller support for movement and camera
• Implemented the photo album
• Implemented saving photos taken in the game to local storage

Next Steps

• Polishing the first level
• Building the rooms for the next levels and implementing their mechanics
• Adding visual player feedback for photos that are way off the prompt