This project was a survival/horror game where the player had to survive in a hotel with a shapeshifter. The game is centralized on the exploration of the hotel, where the player meets unique characters and speaks with them in order to complete quests and obtain items and trust. Trust is necessary to get specific events/avoid being killed by human NPCs. 

For this project we needed to create a point-and-click game. During this project, I programmed the day cycle, created the game art/UI, wrote some narrative, and created the level and game flow. The game flow of our game transitioned to being focused on the daytime rather than the night events, which was our initial goal. There are 9 NPCs that can be spoken to and you must use your time effectively to reveal as much as possible.

This project had an initial concept that was scoped too highly for what our team was capable of within the time limit. Throughout milestones, many tasks were being recorded as incomplete or non-functional, which slowed down the trajectory of the project throughout. I ended up having to take up a much larger amount of work creating the functional, aesthetic, and gameplay parts of the game. Due to this being the case, many of the different parts of the game, such as UI and characters, have a very incomplete and rough feeling. I had to piece the map together as simply as possible for milestone 1 and was unable to properly expand on both the map and movement. A large portion of our game was also meant to be based on finding clues and building trust, which would make the night events more dynamic, but this core gameplay never got around to being fully implemented, leading to the night events feeling more hollow and the core game being a walking sim / visual novel.

I learned a lot about the production and development of a game and what can go wrong throughout this project. Teamwork is core to a project, and even though communication was consistent throughout the project, the game was possibly too complex for the team. Scoping is very important, and from the early milestones, we should have started cutting content that was less important for the final vision of our game, rather than what did happen, where I tried to put everything into the game, even when our game's trajectory couldn't reach the core goal.  I learnt how necessary it was to have feature owners that consistently adapt features and gameplay to that of others, since having one person do multiple things in a larger project can often lead to all aspects being done at a lower level, leading to a worse overall project