Post Game Jam

First, I'd like to thank everyone who reviewed the game and played it. I implemented some feedback I received from some comments on the jam submission. Most importantly, I reduced the file size to be a more acceptable amount. I made a few changes to the game's progression. I improved the exposition text at the beginning and increased the player's walk speed.

This is the game's post-mortem since I do not intend to continue to work on the game any further and would rather spend my time on other projects. My favorite part of game development is learning new things and improving what I know. While I could workshop this game to improve it, I'd prefer to let it rest and look at it later as it was to help remind me of progress I am making in my hobby.

WHAT WENT RIGHT?

I think the graphics turned out very well. I was very lucky to catch a great sale on the assets and I'm really happy to add them to my collection and use them in future projects. Dissecting the demoscenes that came with the project taught me a great deal about Unity's lighting system, light probes, reflection probes, baked lighting, etc. With quality props came the need to pretty up the game which gave me the chance to dive more into post-processing effects. Most importantly, I implemented asynchronous functions into my code as well as utilized Unity's event system which greatly increased the speed and utility of my normal workflow and allowed me to move away from an inheritance-focused framework into a more generic and utility-based one saving me a lot of time on writing scripts and debugging. The approach I took to sound design seemed to be one of the stronger points of the project and I really wanted to focus on the atmosphere of each room and trying to convey what happened through sound.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

The core gameplay loop was extremely poorly explained and it was intended that multiple playthroughs would be required to learn how to get a better score and where a player can improve. I think this went wrong because in a short horror game like this one playthrough is really all you can expect of people. I think it's because the story was pretty obfuscated and ambiguous which was intentional since I didn't want a story people would just see and know. I wanted players to come up with their own stories based on their experiences. I feel like that idea doesn't really work and may work better in the future if there was at least some unambiguous but incomplete story for the player to digest. I intend to mull over this concept in the future and try to focus on it in my next personal project.

-Regards

WhoReallyCares