Past Cure v2 DevLog (Contains Spoilers)

Hello everyone, After months of work, we finally deliver Past Cure v2. Since the release, there have been a lot of criticism we received and we decided to opt for a patch that addresses some of these. First of all, I assume it would be fair to give you the status of the studio. We are now down to 4 people, a team of a programmer, an animator, an environment artist and a character artist. This definitely made working on the patch harder, especially if we take into account Past Cure being on three platforms. So for the changelogs, I would like to go over them with the general criticism that we received so far. A note however, due to time and manpower limitations, it was not realistic to tackle everything on the desired intensity. - Gameplay and some levels are repetitive and boring This was quite the case on the chessroom and parking lot levels. The main reason for the chessroom to be in this format was generally testing of the game with people that do not have too much previous game experience. Just to pass that you can use certain abilities in certain combinations made chessroom long and boring. We revamped the chessroom massively so it is not just a map that contains tutorials, it has more story integrity, less repetition and more cohesion with the game. In the case of parking lot, it was a different case, it was just going through similar looking environment, shooting enemies and repeat this x times. The cause of this was picking an environment that doesn't necessarily contain too much that can go on. If you were to think about that, what can you place into a parking lot, other than concrete and cars? So the first design basically was a victim to this. After the feedback, it was obvious that something had to be done. We first thought of shortening it, but this meant reduction in playtime and we were not really happy with going with this approach given it meant less value for price, which also was a debate in the criticism we received. However we could capitalize on supernatural elements of Past Cure, which allowed us to add more to the parking lot, other than concrete and cars (Will only state this much just not to spoil more). - Superpowers are not fun and abusable So one of the issues we observed was the power of slow motion, coupled with the sanity regeneration mechanics the game has. Basically you could use slow motion, leave cover and shoot, stop slowmo and cover back and wait for your sanity to regenerate. Knowing this, most of the players took the safe path of doing this which made the game dull. There were a few ways to address this, which one was to improve the AI to push you out of your cover but the ability problems were still there. Attempting a fix on AI was something we wanted to stay away from given broken AI is much worse than stupid AI and this is a part that requires a lot of polish. We instead took another approach of 1. limiting the sanity regeneration and 2. causing a side effect to sanity usage (Ignoring the screen blur that is caused on low sanity, which doesn't hinder the user that much, not to be confused with the screenshake upon reaching zero sanity). Now sanity no longer regenerates below 35% automatically. Instead upon reaching 0 sanity, sanity regenerates to 35% but spawning porcelain figures. Killing porcelain figures increase the maximum regeneration above 35% so technically is a method to convert your ammo into sanity if you have abundance of it. If your sanity reaches to the maximum regeneration point, all spawned porcelain figures get destroyed (And you can also take a blue pill to trigger this). This behavior only triggers on real world sections given loss of sanity brings nightmares of Ian to surface and does not trigger on nightmare sections of the game. Also, compared to slow motion, mindfly had much less going on, allowing you to only interact with select few objects and some scouting. Also the amount of sanity drained with this ability was making it feel like a less wise way of spending your sanity. Because of this, we added the ability Mind Bash to mind fly. If you hold Aim and Fire buttons during mind fly, you will spring backwards and upon releasing the buttons, you will execute a mind bash, hitting the object in front of you. This replaces the interaction mechanics with the space bar button so everything you had to activate with space bar, you now have to mind bash. You can also hit human enemies with it to stun them, allowing you to kill them while maintaining your stealth. You can interact with some objects that contain electricity to electrify your mind bash which launches faster and further and killing human enemies upon contact. Also mind fly now does not contain sanity over time, only executing a mind bash does so it can be used for scouting purposes without worrying much about your sanity. And finally, activating mind fly will create a shield around Ian, absorbing damage taken by the cost of sanity (Bear in mind, your mind fly can still be interrupted). This makes mind fly an option during an encounter. - Bosses are not fun, smart and can easily be cheesed This issue contained a few parts of the game and we tried our best to address them. Due to sanity changes, cheesing mechanics were compansated for but we wanted to add more. However we found ourselves in a state which a change required some fine tuning or complete revamping. During Amos fight, we added a mechanic which you had to mind bash the shield surrounding Amos to break it but it seemed to make the boss fight too hard, even on Easy difficulty so we ended up reverting the change. - Forced stealth sections This was a part that took A LOT OF criticism. The biggest issue we had upon tackling this was the environment design, time limitations and repeating the same mistake of repetitiveness. Basically, converting the stealth section to pure fights would make them just another gunfight section, which we have plenty and the environment design would make them poor action sections. We could redesign the environment to fit either puzzles or better designed action parts but the time and manpower limitations we had forced us to opt out of these decisions. We ended up with triggering a timer upon detection which offers player a grace period in which they should kill all enemies in the area, otherwise it would fail. This also has the effect of magnifying the power of slow motion since it would also affect this timer so it can be used not only for aiming better, but also giving the player more time to eliminate enemies. - Overall feel of the game If you played the game before the patch, you will not notice a lot of changes on how the game feels mechanically in terms of shooting or moving but we believe it will feel substantially different in terms of decisionmaking, managing your resources (Ammo, sanity, pills) as well as your environment (Do I have enough space if I lose my sanity, is it worth to have 4 more seconds of slow motion on my current state?). Wrapping Up: As stated before, now with even more limited resources, we wanted to redeem some parts of Past Cure with efficiency in mind, trying to make decisions that does more impact to the game for the time and manpower we have. It is a fair wish if we could change more but this is not always possible, especially when a change can impact a lot other areas. As always, we would like to hear your opinions, especially the ones comparing it to the previous version of the game so we can evaluate ourselves if we made correct decisions and correct executions of them. And my personal apologies for still not bringing in mouse control on the menu:( Best wishes, Kaan, on behalf of Phantom8 Studios