3rd April – 6th April (Easter Break Documentation)
For the last couple of days, I worked on refining and researching character portraits for the project. Here are a couple of examples of portraits that have been made:
For making expressions, I referenced Stardew Valley portraits to show the character’s wide range of expressions.
Since we planned for the character’s dialogue to be limited, I only created a couple of expressions that would align with his dialogue. This is because, as a group, we felt as if dialogue in a horror game could quickly lose it’s charm if used extensively; especially if our main, fundamental goal was to create fear for our audience through tension.
Much like in films, a lot of the time no dialogue in certain scenes would help convey emotion far better as it gives the audience an opportunity to come up with their own conclusions and thoughts within each interaction.
This week, we have also decided to scrap the insanity component in the blink mechanic. This was due to development time being incredibly limited and by adding an insanity component it means designing 15 unique sprites for each stage which we didn’t have enough time for. However, with this cut, it means I can focus more time in developing unique sprites for each floor. I still kept the previous designs and decided to create a new system for the enemy sprites.
This system is called: Deterioration. Once again, purely a visual system but this time, the further you down with each floor, the more deteriorated the monsters get.
I plan to make 8 / 9 sprites for each floor including a boss sprite for the ending. However, in this stage of development, we are unsure whether or not we’d be able to make a boss for the game because, in terms of my role, it would mean making unique animations for movement and attacks as well as creating special patterns for the boss to adhere to. This would take up a large slot in our development schedule and we will have a conclusion for this decision by the next dev log.