Postmortem

Trepidation as a game, while simple, creates such an immersive experience that can strike fear within a player. This game focuses a lot on sound design and lighting which is what I really enjoy when playing and creating games. Sound plays a vital part within the game to create the horror ambience while also causing discomfort and scares from the sounds playing at what seems like random times. With the lighting, or should I say lack of lighting, aids in the tone of the game since the player can only see what is illuminated by the flashlight which pressures them into constantly looking around in order to see where they are going or what is potentially around them. Those main design practices are what I enjoy creating since they heavily contribute to a game's theme / tone and are things that a player constantly interacts with and can easily recognize. When conceptualizing and then creating this game I realized that I am more “hands on” than I thought when creating games. I was constantly tinkering in Unreal creating things in-game and feeling them out versus writing down ideas or rough sketches of how I wanted things to look or be mapped out. I did however watch many playthroughs and videos of games that had a similar vibe or concept. With this research, I wanted to capture the games’ similar tones and took the time to really understand how and why those concepts worked within the different games. For example, in FNAF 2 lighting plays a major part since you need to shine your flashlight on some animatronics to make them go away or to see them in the camera. Sound also plays an equally important part as there is an “alarm” letting the player know when animatronics are close and a music that needs to constantly be playing so the player doesn't lose. When in the early parts of designing the game, I quickly decided on having the map be pitch black since the lack of sight forces the player to look around and adds a sense of the unknown. I also knew I wanted some voice acting since it helped players in terms of why they needed to leave the forest and when they were getting close to the game's end. For the voice acting, I had my friend record the lines and I tinkered with them a bit before putting them in the game. The sound effects were either gathered from a copyright free website and edited or were sounds I made for a separate project that I was working on this quarter. I took my time looking through the website to find some really nice forest and monster sounds that fit the tone I was going for. For example, the forest ambience I have playing was found from that website along with a couple other sounds. With those decisions in place, I can confidently say that I really enjoy the game's sound and lighting as they both heavily contribute to the game’s horror theme. A pitch black  forest complete with the perfect ambience track and sounds scattered around to scare the player was a great concept and I’m very proud of it. However, there are some things that I wish could have been implemented or done better. I do wish my map was bigger so there was more for the player to explore and more area for me to add more sounds / jumpscares without them overlapping or becoming too repetitive. I also wish that the in-game model assets looked better with the lighting and had smaller collision boxes. I tried to mess with them but since they were premade free assets I got from online there wasn’t much I could do in terms of messing with their collision boxes or how they interacted with the flashlight without breaking the assets or having them look even worse. I also wanted there to be an opening and ending cutscene but every time I tried to make them they looked very bad and never fit in how I envisioned. In the future, I would probably take more time in first messing with the premade assets to make sure they work as intended or just take the time and try to make my own. I also would probably try to make the map bigger and keep in mind that it will be filled with things the player can and cannot see. It's way easier to make changes earlier in the development process then decide something needs to be changed when a project is almost done. Continuing in speaking about the map, I feel like I could have had a more appropriate size if I knew how many sound assets I was eventually going to have. I had a rough idea in the beginning but wound up with more sounds than originally planned and they all fit the theme so it felt right having them within the game. If I had a better rough idea of how many sound assets would be created, the map would have been bigger to fit in those sound collision boxes so that they wouldn't overlap or be hit by the player too quickly resulting in multiple sounds playing at once which would be messy and audibly confusing. Overall, I really enjoyed this class and the game I made which led me to learn a lot about myself and my creation processes as well as more about the pipeline of the game creation process.