This was a side project started by me. I scripted and designed the game, including menus, player controllers, enemy AI, and collectables, and the art assets were created by a team of volunteer artist from my school, lead by me. The goal of the project was to explore design tools and experiment with design. Additionally, most of the sounds in the game was foley created by me.
Leading the Blind
One of the hardest challenge that came from this project was the tutorial. This is because the main mechanic makes it difficult to teach the player using visual methods. While closing your eyes to go invisible is naturally intriguing, it's also difficult for some to conceptualize. So teaching it was a struggle. The initial attempt was to use story and audio cues. In fact a whole character and area was created to facilitate this, but it was discovered that audio clues weren't direct enough. I initially wanted to try to do a game with no visual prompting, but I had to concede eventually due to the tutorial.
The solution I landed on was a very simple reactive prompt. On start the player has a single sentence explain to "Press space to close your eyes". This prompt doesn't go away till they do so. This makes sure they try the mechanic. Once closed, I swap the text explaining that they are invisible and how to open their eyes.
In addition to that, further information is delivered by "Conscious", a voice in the player head that activates at key moments: first enemy encounter, first collectable encounter, and being heard. These lines are kept very simple not to lose the player and to retain comprehension.
Another piece of tutorialization is for the Sentry enemy. The first time they were caught, people tended to panic. It does rip you off your feet suddenly. Because of this, players tended to be less receptive to information. To combat this, along with visual and audio feedback, a small prompt explains what happened and how to escape as the game speed is slowed down, but only on the first encounter
