What’s New?

This week I fleshed out the phase and day transition system as well as scaffolded the item placement system. I created and added a rough NPC model with animations that has hot swappable colours.

Day Flow

The flow of the day is visualised with a clock that changes between day, night and spooky hour. The day is broken into 4 phases consisting of Pre-phase, Prep-phase, spook-phase and a recap/postmortem-phase.

Design-wise I believe in the necessity of gameplay loops that involve setup and execution, this is reflected in the phases.

The pre-phase will display the pre-liminary information pertaining to the day. This will include the number and type of NPCs who will appear and what the fear quota for the day is.

The prep-phase consists of the setup. Spending one’s fear currency to place down active traps and passive effects around the house. The player will need to balance how much they want to invest in more spookiness or saving for the next day’s quota.

The spook-phase is the execution. This phase is mostly passive and observation with gameplay of activating the previously placed active traps. As this phase is mostly observation the movements of the NPCs need to be interesting to watch. I believe I have executed this but continue to refine whenever ideas appear.

Finally, the postmortem-phase. This phase recaps players economy (adding the generated fear and subtracting the quota) alongside adding a piece of flavour text for the day. This flavour text serves as some light entertainment as well as justifying the appearance of NPCs each day.

NPC Model

I have added a basic NPC model with animations. As it will only be seen from far away to much detail was put into the model. The model will have a randomised set of colours for each NPC (within reason) however this is not enough variation for me. I believe the only way to get the player to be able to track NPC is if they had a more defining characteristic. Eventually I will be implementing randomised hats (hair included) and potentially trinkets or backpacks to help tell them apart. Potentially giving them names will help with that however that will come when I add the fear meter and whatnot.

What’s next?

Development is starting to stagnate as I wait for another person to finish in world interaction and object placement. However, in the meantime I can work on either Aesthetics of the building (Architecture and setdressing) and creating the in world UI elements for the NPCs (potentially names and fear meters).