Into The Light - Devblog #2

We are back today for our Devblog number 2 where we talk about the evolution of our gameplay and level design.

We have been developing this game for two years now, during all our production we had to make design choices that respect our technical and human constraints.

The very first concept: the beginning of the adventure

At the very beginning our desire was to make a game with a horrific atmosphere with puzzle solving. All this in a 3d universe in first person. The main objective for the player was to bring lost souls to a portal to free them.

The player could move around the world as well as move cubes whose faces gave a directional command to a soul that came in contact with that face. The souls had a behavior of movement constrained by the orders of direction if it touched the cube then its direction became that indicated by the cube.

The player had a limit to how far he could move the cubes. He had to think carefully before taking any action. The souls also had to stay in the light, so the player could interact with a ball of light above him to move it and follow the movement of the souls.

The problem here was that we had a lot of trouble incorporating an interesting storyline and a horrific atmosphere. So we reworked the formula.

We still have some images that illustrate this first concept:

The second concept: level design at the service of reflection

Here we have a doubt about our game, after five months of development we decide to start over and make bigger levels and have more fun.

We write a story that we care about, we look for concepts and we push the graphics of our game. We decide that our puzzle gameplay will revolve around the theme "Getting out of a maze", our maze will become a bunker.

In a bunker it can be easily explained that doors are closed and have to be opened with a mechanism, the objective here for the player will be to get out of the maze by activating the levers in the right order. The problem was that there was no "danger" and no risk. So we decided to add some.

We searched our hard drives and found this video that illustrates the first drafts of the gameplay :

The third concept: Let there be light

One mechanic we had from the beginning was related to light. We kept it to create an additional constraint for the player. The longer he stays in the dark, the more he is affected by madness (translated by a stress bar, if it falls to 0 the character dies).

So he will have to use a lantern, recharge it, but also activate switches to turn on lights. But it was still too simple for us, so for each switch and lever activated an energy charge was used. This charge of energy came from a generator that had a limited number of charges. If the generator ran out of energy he had to reactivate the generator manually and all mechanisms related to the generator were disabled.

Fourth concept: What if we were not alone?

Well, now we have a not too shaky concept with an objective and a constraint. But we were missing a little bit of stress, that thing that would push the player to make mistakes and thus force him to take decisions. That's