Week 1

Week 1 - Introduction

Team Members: Cian Halpin, Matthew Duffin

Cian:

Questions:

Does slow movement make a game scary?
Can a sprint mechanic work with tank controls?

In this introductory devlog, I want to discuss the idea for our game along with what we learned from our first prototypes. As of now, we are setting out to create a horror game, most likely in the form of a simple walking sim with the possibility of further mechanics. We wanted to theme the game around classic PSX horror games of the past, similar to Resident Evil 1 and early Silent Hill games.

Our first prototypes were centered around movement in the game. Personally, when I think of horror games I think the lack of an ability to act is what makes them scary. To that end, I didn't want the player to have many different movement options. I opted to go against conventional wisdom and make use of classic tank controls, such as in RE1, to reduce the agency the players has. Tank controls make use of fixed camera angles, with the player moving in relation to the camera position, rather than themselves.

I created a prototype to see if the idea was worth exploring further and was pleased with the outcome. Fixed camera angles allows us to get creative with how the world is presented to the player, and the somewhat unconventional control scheme works well with the PSX aesthetic. I also experimented with a sprint mechanic that would require the player to manage their stamina lest they be left in an unfortunate situation without the ability to escape. I feel that the movement mechanics came together well for the prototype.

Matthew:

Questions:

Does resource management make the player more aware of their decisions?

I decided I wanted to make a stamina system for the game, I spent some time brainstorming how I wanted the system to work and interact with the player's actions. We decided to have stamina play a crucial role in activities such as running and certain actions.

 It was clear that stamina management would add an exciting layer of strategy to our gameplay.  I started by creating a UI element for the stamina bar. Unity's UI tools made this relatively straightforward. The stamina bar would be displayed in the player's HUD, providing a visual representation of their current stamina level. Next, I wrote the code to make the stamina drain when running, recharge when stamina is not in use and work with the UI. I also added a cooldown to sprinting once stamina is full drained making resource management important. It took some tweaking to get  working, but it was worth it in the end.