Development log 2.1



๐Ÿ›  Devlog #2.1: Conceptualizing the Core Gameplay : (Decision made during the lab session)

English

In this devlog, I want to introduce the foundation of my current game project โ€” a suspense-driven puzzle-exploration game where players must identify and correct anomalies in each level before being overwhelmed.

๐Ÿงฉ Game Structure

Each level is designed to introduce a new paranormal investigation tool:

  • Tutorial โ€“ No tools. Focuses on environmental storytelling and basic controls.
  • Level 1 โ€“ Introduces the Flashlight: navigate dark environments.
  • Level 2 โ€“ Adds the Flash Beacon: briefly reveals hidden anomalies.
  • Level 3 โ€“ The EMF Reader: detects ghostly disturbances near objects.
  • Level 4 โ€“ Introduces the Camera: helps confirm object alterations by comparing photos.

๐ŸŽฎ Core Loop

The gameplay begins as the elevator doors open and the player enters a room. Initially calm, tension rises as anomalies start appearing off-screen. The player must spot changes and restore items to their original state. As time progresses, the number and frequency of anomalies increase, putting pressure on the playerโ€™s observation skills.

๐Ÿ”” Alerts & Fail States

A distinct alert sound signals when a new anomaly appears. If the player fails to act in time or too many anomalies accumulate, they will โ€œpass out,โ€ triggering a level restart โ€” emphasizing vigilance and time management.

๐Ÿšช Level Transition

At the end of each level, the room stabilizes, lights return to normal, and the elevator doors reopen with a satisfying โ€œding.โ€ The player steps in, and the next level loads seamlessly in the background, keeping immersion intact.


๐Ÿ›  ๊ฐœ๋ฐœ์ผ์ง€ #1: ํ•ต์‹ฌ ๊ฒŒ์ž„ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ด ๊ตฌ์ƒํ•˜๊ธฐ

ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด

์ด๋ฒˆ ๊ฐœ๋ฐœ์ผ์ง€์—์„œ๋Š” ํ˜„์žฌ ๊ฐœ๋ฐœ ์ค‘์ธ ๊ฒŒ์ž„ ํ”„๋กœ์ ํŠธ์˜ ํ•ต์‹ฌ ๊ตฌ์ƒ์— ๋Œ€ํ•ด ์†Œ๊ฐœํ•˜๋ ค๊ณ  ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด ๊ฒŒ์ž„์€ ๊ธด์žฅ๊ฐ ๋„˜์น˜๋Š” ํผ์ฆ ํƒ์ƒ‰ ๊ฒŒ์ž„์œผ๋กœ, ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ด์–ด๋Š” ๊ฐ ๋ ˆ๋ฒจ์—์„œ ์ด์ƒ ํ˜„์ƒ์„ ์ฐพ์•„๋‚ด๊ณ  ๋ฐ”๋กœ์žก์•„์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๐Ÿงฉ ๊ฒŒ์ž„ ๊ตฌ์กฐ

๊ฐ ๋ ˆ๋ฒจ์€ ์ƒˆ๋กœ์šด ์ดˆ์ž์—ฐ์  ์กฐ์‚ฌ ๋„๊ตฌ๋ฅผ ์†Œ๊ฐœํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค:

  • ํŠœํ† ๋ฆฌ์–ผ โ€“ ๋„๊ตฌ ์—†์Œ. ํ™˜๊ฒฝ ์Šคํ† ๋ฆฌํ…”๋ง๊ณผ ๊ธฐ๋ณธ ์กฐ์ž‘์— ์ง‘์ค‘.
  • 1๋ ˆ๋ฒจ โ€“ ์†์ „๋“ฑ ๋„์ž…: ์–ด๋‘์šด ํ™˜๊ฒฝ์„ ํƒํ—˜ํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.
  • 2๋ ˆ๋ฒจ โ€“ ํ”Œ๋ž˜์‹œ ๋น„์ฝ˜ ์ถ”๊ฐ€: ์ˆจ๊ฒจ์ง„ ์ด์ƒ ํ˜„์ƒ์„ ์ˆœ๊ฐ„์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋“œ๋Ÿฌ๋ƒ…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.
  • 3๋ ˆ๋ฒจ โ€“ EMF ๋ฆฌ๋”: ๋ฌผ์ฒด ๊ทผ์ฒ˜์˜ ์œ ๋ น ํ˜„์ƒ์„ ๊ฐ์ง€ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.
  • 4๋ ˆ๋ฒจ โ€“ ์นด๋ฉ”๋ผ ๋„์ž…: ์‚ฌ์ง„์„ ๋น„๊ตํ•ด ์ด์ƒ ์—ฌ๋ถ€๋ฅผ ํ™•์ธํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๐ŸŽฎ ํ•ต์‹ฌ ๋ฃจํ”„

๊ฒŒ์ž„์€ ์—˜๋ฆฌ๋ฒ ์ดํ„ฐ ๋ฌธ์ด ์—ด๋ฆฌ๋ฉฐ ์‹œ์ž‘๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ด์–ด๋Š” ๋ฐฉ์„ ํƒ์ƒ‰ํ•˜๋‹ค๊ฐ€, ์ผ์ • ์‹œ๊ฐ„์ด ์ง€๋‚˜๋ฉด ์ด์ƒ ํ˜„์ƒ์ด ๋“ฑ์žฅํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ณ€ํ™”๋Š” ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ด์–ด๊ฐ€ ๋ณด์ง€ ์•Š์„ ๋•Œ ์ผ์–ด๋‚˜๋ฉฐ, ์ ์  ๊ทธ ๋นˆ๋„์™€ ์ˆ˜๊ฐ€ ์ฆ๊ฐ€ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ด์–ด๋Š” ๋ณ€ํ™”๋ฅผ ์•Œ์•„์ฑ„๊ณ  ์›๋ž˜ ์ƒํƒœ๋กœ ๋ณต๊ตฌํ•ด์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๐Ÿ”” ๊ฒฝ๊ณ  ๋ฐ ์‹คํŒจ ์กฐ๊ฑด

์ด์ƒ ํ˜„์ƒ์ด ๋‚˜ํƒ€๋‚  ๋•Œ ๊ฒฝ๊ณ ์Œ์ด ์šธ๋ฆฝ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ œ๋•Œ ์กฐ์น˜๋ฅผ ์ทจํ•˜์ง€ ์•Š๊ฑฐ๋‚˜ ์ด์ƒ ํ˜„์ƒ์ด ๋ˆ„์ ๋˜๋ฉด, ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ด์–ด๋Š” ๊ธฐ์ ˆํ•˜๊ณ  ๋ ˆ๋ฒจ์ด ๋‹ค์‹œ ์‹œ์ž‘๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด ๋ฉ”์ปค๋‹ˆ์ฆ˜์€ ์ง‘์ค‘๋ ฅ๊ณผ ์‹œ๊ฐ„ ๊ด€๋ฆฌ์˜ ์ค‘์š”์„ฑ์„ ๊ฐ•์กฐํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๐Ÿšช ๋ ˆ๋ฒจ ์ „ํ™˜

๋ ˆ๋ฒจ์ด ๋๋‚˜๋ฉด ์กฐ๋ช…์ด ์›๋ž˜๋Œ€๋กœ ๋Œ์•„์˜ค๊ณ , ์—˜๋ฆฌ๋ฒ ์ดํ„ฐ ๋ฌธ์ด โ€œ๋”ฉโ€ ์†Œ๋ฆฌ์™€ ํ•จ๊ป˜ ์—ด๋ฆฝ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ด์–ด๋Š” ์—˜๋ฆฌ๋ฒ ์ดํ„ฐ์— ๋‹ค์‹œ ํƒ‘์Šนํ•˜๋ฉฐ, ๋‹ค์Œ ๋ ˆ๋ฒจ์ด ๋ฐฑ๊ทธ๋ผ์šด๋“œ์—์„œ ๋กœ๋“œ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ชฐ์ž…๊ฐ์„ ์œ ์ง€ํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•œ ํ๋ฆ„์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.


P.S Update required (From user feedback)

User Feedback Summary 1. Clear In-Game Tutorial Issue: Players are confused about what to do at the beginning.

Solution: Add an in-game tutorial or instructions to help players understand their objective immediately upon starting. The tutorial should explain the core gameplay mechanics, tools, and objectives without relying on external sources like the website.

  1. Enhance Sound Design Issue: The current lack of sound makes the game feel empty.

Solution: Add sound effects for interactions, such as pressing the E key or restoring an object. Additionally, incorporate ambient sounds or background music to enhance the atmosphere, creating a more immersive experience.

  1. Improve Interaction Feedback Issue: Players couldnโ€™t tell if they successfully interacted with objects.

Solution: Add visual and audio feedback for interactions, such as:

Animations when objects are restored.

Sound effects that provide satisfaction when an interaction succeeds.

Particle effects or subtle screen shakes for a tactile sense of accomplishment.

  1. Add Progress Indicators Issue: Players are unsure of their progress.

Solution: Include a UI element that shows how many objects the player has fixed or how much progress they have made. Consider adding small rewards after each interaction (e.g., a sound or visual effect) to reinforce the playerโ€™s sense of accomplishment.

  1. Enhance Game Feel (Juiciness) Issue: The game currently lacks an engaging sense of โ€œimpactโ€ during interactions.

Solution: Improve the โ€œimpactโ€ when interacting with objects by adding:

Stronger animations or more exaggerated reactions when objects are restored.

Vibrations or screen shakes to give the player a physical feedback sensation.

  1. Narration or Commentary Issue: The game could use more engagement and personality.

Solution: Consider adding a narrator or voiceover that provides philosophical or humorous commentary. This could help with immersion, similar to the style of games like Getting Over It, adding personality to the experience.

  1. Strengthen Core Gameplay Loop Issue: The current mechanic of restoring objects feels shallow.

Solution: Introduce additional mechanics to deepen engagement:

Time limits that pressure players to act quickly.

Combo bonuses for restoring multiple objects quickly.

Randomly generated object chaos over time to keep the gameplay dynamic.

Upgrades or abilities, like faster restore speed or area repair, that evolve the playerโ€™s capabilities.

  1. Consider Alternative Game Concepts Issue: The concept of fixing destruction might not be as exciting as it could be.

Solution:

Shift the focus towards creating more chaos instead of fixing destruction.

Consider a cleaning game concept similar to Lethal Company or Viscera Cleanup Detail. This could involve multiplayer mechanics, upgradeable items, and a shop system.

  1. Clarify Story and Motivation Issue: Players are unsure why they are restoring the ruined environment.

Solution: Introduce a simple story to clarify the playerโ€™s motivation. Some possible themes include:

Restoring a broken life or a broken world.

Using the elevator as a symbol of progression or escape.

A narrative thread that ties the playerโ€™s actions to a greater purpose.

Comments

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Ah, I forgot to add on that we are going to clean up the branches. well it is not for announcement for game playersโ€ฆ though !