The Darkest Light : Let's talk about design choices
Hey jammers !
First of all, thank you for all your feedbacks ! As a junior french dev team, seeing that you enjoyed our little game means the world for us !
After 50+ ratings and 30+ feedbacks, a pattern is designing itself. So we want to come back and talk with you about our design choices (good or bad).
Disclaimer :
The game is an atmospheric horror game, by reading the next part of the post you may spoil yourself the enemy behaviour, the light up / light down mechanic, and some other things. The post is not really a post-mortem, it's more a "let's talk", and we are looking for feedbacks and advices ;)
So we strongly recommand to play the game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-darkest-light
The light mechanic :
"The character has a light which is his range of vision. He can light down and light up. The more light he has, the more enemies will run at him. The goal is to get to the exit of the maze. The game must push players to light up, in order to have the "the more you have, the worse it is" effect." That was the original 5AM Saturday concept.
Next to it, we thought that a constantly decreasing light range, was more stressful for the player, making him light up at a constant rate, creating a "routine" that could be disturbed by enemies and Level Design.
In the level we put door activating braseros which must be triggered by light (sticking with the "light up" mechanic). We used this props to create fear and surprise. In fact, the player must think about the interactable object before thinking about ghosts placed at the exact same range. Cons : The game is short, but this kind of surprise effect could be totally trivial if used too much.
Feedbacks on the mechanic : Good ! It seems to create the stress and surprise effect as intended.
The ghost behaviour :
The enemies are ghosts who are able to pass through walls. This mechanic allowed us to place them outside the character path, making them instanly more powerfull than the character. We decided to let them pass through walls to link this with le light mechanic : the only place to hide is darkness. You can't loose them passing behind a wall, or hiding in a room corner.
Feedbacks : Good ! Also seems to work as intended. But a bit frustrating sometimes, where your light is really low, and they jump at you so fast you are not able te react and die. Balancing the ghost spotting you at long range, and those sprotting you ate close range is a little bit tricky.
Potential fix : We could slow the reaction time of the "close spawning" ghosts without affecting the others. Thanks to @somethinboutgames ;)
The in game text At the start of the game, some floating text will appear at the bottom of the screen, explaining in a nebular way the objectives and the mechanic.
Feedbacks : some player could be annoyed by the "not mood related" text, explaining a mechanic that they already had figured out. This was a dilemma during the development. We let the text, deciding that the primary goal was that EVERYONE could play it, and EVERYONE could understand the mechanic, knowing that veteran and very smart player would understand it immedialty, and could be annoyed by this.
A solution would be to let it as an option, or blending it to the assest (text directly written on ground or walls)
The character movement system :
The character controller is heavy : up arrow to move forward, down arrow to move -forward, left/right to rotate. The camera follows the character's forward, and it was designed to loose the player in the maze. If the camera was not rotating with the player, it could be much easier to understand the Level Design and get to the end.
It seems to be the major frustration though.
We designed it that way to make the character weak, and to create tension. Unfortunalty it seems we did a little too much on that...
We'll try to improve this mechanic, maybe allowing strafe, but it will be hard to change it without loosing the tension it 's creating or breaking the ghost balance... If you have ideas, we are totally opened to it !
The bugs and the unfinished features :
-The animations #Not Fixed#
The lacking animations seems to be the major problem of the game, and it's a problem which is planned to be fixed ;)
-The sound mixing #Fixed#
Some sounds (the ghost's screems) seemed to be not well mixed, this is now fixed !
-The light shader
This one was extremly tricky : the field of view must trigger braseros and the ghosts. We are not really familiar with shader, so we did what we could. The solution we found saldy creates some weird artefact when player's light collides with brasero's light. We'll try to improve this mechanic later.
Don't hesitate to let us know in the comment section if you have feedbacks and ideas to improve this little interactable piece of software we did ;)
And thank you again for all your feedbacks !
We will soon upload MACOS and Linux builds !
