So there's been a lot of behind the scenes discussions on gameplay, target audience and replay-ability, as we've decided that we're going apply for funding, so there's a lot of questions that need answering in order to present this project in a clear and concise way to potential investors.
A big step for me was completely eradicating any AI in the project, I really have a personal distaste for it, I'm putting my foot down and I think we should start as we mean to go on. The only AI content in the game so far has been the placeholder paintings, so I have now replaced all of these for royalty free real-life paintings from Unsplash. I think they just have so much more character to them and I can confidently say that there is no AI in the game at all anymore, I literally rewrote over the texture files so they don't even exist in the project! I might still edit or replace these paintings in the future, but they are great placeholders. I have been studying horror games set in manor houses lately and I have been getting a lot of inspiration from Layers of Fear especially, so there might be a slight nod to that (with paintings changing horrifically during gameplay) as development progresses.
AI vs Real Paintings
I carried out the repetitive task of swapping out all doors for the interactive blueprint versions, so now all doors work as expected, I have also hooked up the loot objects with the blueprint that Luke created, and I tested everything. It has created another task for me now though, which is deciding about UI and icon images. I've very briefly started looking into this and honestly I got bored! 😅 I'm not a UI artist and I really don't seem to have any sort of passion towards it, so I will be asking my UI friends for initial guidance and maybe this is where we may hire someone to do it properly later down the line. But I created a mock-up, which is maybe ok? I don't know, I will seek advice from more knowledgeable people!
Another big change has been that I found a girl model that I was actually happy with for the evil player. The Demon Doll Character from HelenNova on Render Hub just fit almost perfectly with the idea that I had in my head for this character. I would maybe like to change the hairstyle later down the line but it's set up in such a useful way that this doesn't seem like it will be an issue at all. I assigned some idle animations and attached a light underneath her face, and she just looks so menacing looming outside of the windows, it's great!
A big decision we made was to add cards for modifiers for the evil player. I hadn't really put a whole lot of thought into what gameplay would be like for the evil player, other than it would be like a top down of the house and they'd activate traps etc. But now we've decided that there will be a deck of cards that enable different randomised abilities, which will make each playthrough a different experience. They would visually look like a sort of tarot deck, which could also tie into the lore of the game. Maybe the girl found this cursed card deck and that's where these magical abilities come from. We still need to decide on the full list of abilities, but for now it's probably best to decide on a handful, and we can add more as the project goes on. I spent an hour or two on my drawing tablet with a sleeping Pumpkin on my lap and created two mock-ups for how I imagine these cards would look. This is also something that could be a potential unlockable based on a levelling-up system or maybe future DLC.