Currently, our team is preparing for the playtest Thursday so I just wanted to make a brief update in regards to what we are all working on and trying to get ready.
Recently, we decided that our bathroom tutorial room wasn’t good enough. It didn’t introduce picking up objects or going through portals, you just sort of had to find out how to do that. Instead of the bathroom as the tutorial room, we’ve decided to create a room that happens before the bathroom. In order to make sure the playtesters fully understand how to play the game without having our help this new tutorial room will have voice lines depicting what to do as well as a very clear guide on how to proceed to get out of the tutorial. This should help players easily pick up our game.
Next, we’ve decided to revamp the bathroom itself to amplify some of the weirdness of the manor. We did this by increasing all the dimensions of the room and increasing the bathroom ceiling height to comical proportions. This will allow us to further show that this isn’t some normal manor with a simple ghost training grounds.
After that, we’ve decided to fix the kitchen puzzle by using portals to allow yourself to move into objects (such as the fridge) and onto the walls/roof to solve puzzles. One thing we didn’t previously do enough of is using our really cool portal mechanic to play the game. It was previously only done once in the bathroom and there was a massive disconnect between the puzzle in the bathroom and the kitchen.
Lastly, we’re working on bringing together the narration with the overall story and connecting those with the puzzles to make our game feel more cohesive.
Aimless Manor DevBlog 