Thank you to all the people that have played and commented on my entry, much obliged.  I left it alone for a week, wanting to come back to it with a bit of a fresh head and hopefully fresh eyes.  In replaying it a bit there are a few particular points I think are worth talking about, important aspects of the game which I fell I either did or didn’t get right.

-Enjoyability-

Games should always be fun to play in some regard.  Quite frankly, I don’t think the game is very fun.  Winning is largely up to luck and there isn’t much payoff in a play where you lose.  However, most of the aspects discussed below deal with things which would improve this.

-Exploration-

I feel this was simultaneously the biggest success and the biggest failure of the entry.  The torch mechanic made walking around and feeling your way through the darkness fun in itself, giving a real sense of exploring a dark area.  The problem is that there is nothing to find in the darkness, no payoff for the player, destroying any real motivation for the player to explore and making the fun not last.  The ‘monster’ could pretty much be done away with if the area was interesting to explore, using that as the driving motivation for the player to move.  However, during the time frame I couldn’t come up with any good way to generate a random interesting cave.  Which leads nicely to the next point.

-Level design-

Half way through the development the working idea for what I wanted was actually quite different to the random cave with monster.  I wanted to instead have the player start at the entrance to the cave and venturing in.  The cave would be rough at first but slowly leading to a more structured area, with interesting things to see on the walls and such.  Things would slowly get spookier and the area more ancient-temple-like until you got to the heart of the temple.  At this point something would happen and something would start chasing after you, leading to to a desperate sprint for your life, going back along the way you had come and out to the entrance.  Of course I soon realized, as I was getting caught up in the details, I had no chance of doing all that with the time I had left and my ability with the engine I was using.  I instead focused on having some sort of random map, adding a win lose condition and putting some sort of drive and gameplay to the mix.  Speaking of which…

-Game flow-

I think everyone should add a full ‘start’->’game’->’end’->’start’ loop to their game.  I actually got distracted and wrote a whole post on this here.

-Fear-

This was the biggest emotion I was playing with.  I wanted to make something that induced a sense of fear in the player.  I must have succeeded in this to some degree, having had plenty of comments along the lines of “It scared me!”, however I’m not sure if it was the type of ‘scare’ I was after.  What I wanted was the feeling of blindly running from an unknown fear, but what I got was more of the sudden jump scare.  There is some of the former, but I felt more people experienced the latter.  I think a better level design, as mentioned above, would have achieved this better.  However, another aspect of this that I feel I succeeded with was never really giving you a clear view of the ‘monster’.  Trying to look at it when it’s close causes it to speed up greatly, so you can only ever catch a glimpse of it before it’s game over.   Or alternatively. you can only see the tentacles skirting the edge of the light beam.  I did however, want the ‘monster’ to instill more of a feeling of ‘wrongness’, so prevalent in Lovecraftian horrors.  I’m sure there would be a way to do this with introducing/playing on classic game concepts, then breaking them, but that’s still a bit hazy in my mind.

-The rest-

– Sound worked ok, but would be a lot cooler if I could have added left/right stero pan to give sense of direction.

– Ties into level design, but better and more varied floor/wall graphics would be great.  I got caught up in how to deal with perspective and having things covering other things should work with the light.

– Having the ‘monster’ always just move towards you was a mistake in my part, but the simplest way to do the ‘AI’ for it.  A bit more intelligence would be good, but I again got caught up in how to do it.

– Another concept I wanted to play with was to have some aspect of ‘seeing things in the shadows/darkness’.  Just the kind of stuff that might make you suddenly flash your torch at something you thought you saw, only to find nothing there (or perhaps actually find something…).

– It’d actually be really easy to add in the code things which the torchbeam hits that change the colour of the light.  I’m sure there has to be a cool way to use this, but I can’t think of things that fit (Crystals? Stainglass?).

– Sound should have been done in sfxr, which I couldn’t get my hands on during the comp, but have now.

– A col idea from philomory: “Now I think of it, it’d be really sweet if the map changed around you, but I’m only thinking that because this reminds me of House of Leaves.”

-Finally-

There are a number of directions I could take this if I want to expand on it a bit. The torch mechanic would totally work for a quite a few different styles of game and could be a bit of fun to toy around with more.  I think making the more structured level mentioned in the level design bit above might be something I’ll try, if in my head I can work out the small niggles to it.  Any other suggestions people have are welcome too, for anything that I might have missed or things they felt differently about.  Also, thanks for reading (if you made it this far).