Conviction Chronicles blog post #25 - Escape Room 2 + 3

 Merging the two escape rooms into 1 blog post to make it easier.

--Escape Room 2--

I wanted every escape room in the intro to feel unique with how it's completed. The first one is simple/comfy where it's very friendly. With the second I wanted to subvert it with it being in a submarine and being claustrophobic. 

It has a red light where it makes everybody under the same light. 

The way forward is to

1. Vote for someone using a crate which restores power.

2. Play some minigames on the now working PCs to get pieces of a passcode.

3. Read some logs to find the clue that the longest code goes in the middle.

4. Enter the code while trying to piece it together and leave.

Lily has the least amount of dialogue when not playing as her to keep her mysterious mystique. I'll probably go back to add more to the content here so it's not all based on one minigame to make it more diverse. The logs do have some lore implications as well. A big thing is most of the cast is more divisive than the rest and that's by design.

1. Emma herself is more standoff-ish for her survival and desire as a hunter thinking everybody else as prey.

2. The player is made to have a distrust of Jack from the prologue, as a majority of routes will have him go against Tina for his own goals.

3. Jade is eccentric which means some people might love her but not everybody.

4. Lily herself is made to be a wild card as she can barely control herself.

5. Crow is more standoff-ish due to her feelings leading her into the corner to hide in the darkness. 

It made sense to make something much more grim/dark for a start as they all wake up in the same room as each other compared to the other two groups which would be able to communicate together for a common goal, or have Nova solve the problem for them.

--Escape Room 3--

With escape room 3, Nova will auto solve it for the group if she is there. This one is more lore centric which is why the player has to go out of their way to do it. It takes the longest out of the group, where it could be 5 minutes. But since it plays off of the prologue, players might realize this and use this to find out the answers to leave.

The way forward is to 

1. Enter your vote which restores power.

2. Use the 4 crystals to set different settings. 

3. Setting them all on allows for the player to talk to a hologram which informs how to find the answer.

4. Set the crystals to different patterns to read different text

5. use the text to answer the question to open the door.

There is a secret way forward if the player is Tina, where the terminal to answer the question will auto solve it if playing as her.

It's this way since this group has more important characters overall to certain aspects of the plot. 

I've tried to use the dialogue more to build interpersonal relationships of some kind so they can be built up with the cafe events.

Anything else?

The cutscene text beforehand has to be altered quite a bit for each escape room depending on who is alive and who isn't much more than it is at this point so no matter the combination, it all works. Then the full intro with everybody alive I'm going to rework/add onto so it functions as "the first trial" with very light mechanics so people can play through it. This does include adding voting mechanics and such.

This has been a bit of a detour, but so far I believe this to be 100% necessary at this point and time to do it now. After this, then I'll go back to making the log function where actions for the player/other characters are recorded in a calendar type system were it can be reviews and reused for trials if needed. Then the cafe events and fixing the animation system. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Conviction Chronicles blog post #18 - Improved Title Screen

 This is a smaller blogpost, but it does have enough info to warrant it. New Game Introduction When booting the game for the first time, there is a small introduction for "setting up the game's profile." This is mainly so I can set up biases. This is an idea that Gnosia does where items like what color the player chooses impacts the gameplay in very subtle way with enforcing a starting bias.  This also introduces a character that I have planned out for a couple of months now with some 2D sprites. Their 3D model is in the title screen itself. I don't want to go too in-depth with them, but their design has a bunch of symbolism for their role as an assistant type figure which might come apparent later on. This scene only happens once, you can answer the questions, or actively try to deny answering them which loads the default answers. I might have to move it around or change it up later on, and I do have to add the new bias system in based on the answers.  Title Screen I...
Read more

Conviction Chronicles blog post #17 - Evidence gathering implemented

 This is going to be in an update to the demo, but there won't be as much text for this as most of the content done is backend code, which is more technical and doesn't much more to talk about for the average person. Evidence With evidence gathering, I had to go back to everything to add support for slots to be used to store certain information for the player and each living character. Basically it's a very dynamic way of gathering information and pushing it to the storage whenever possible. Lots of checks to make sure it runs well, and I still need to re-review it later to make sure it's doing every thing of evidence correctly. Evidence is stored between >The Main evidence text >Description for the evidence >The date >tags The date is separate since certain tags, like getting evidence from someone else, uses numbers and storing a date in that same slot can make some errors where code might think a tag of getting evidence from someone else means a date inste...
Read more

Conviction Chronicles blog post #12 - Demo is online

 Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3908320/Conviction_Chronicles/ Why the delay? I had to make some smaller changes and bug fixes, but another aspect was the Steam Review where I had to remove one of the options that could have been done when someone was sleeping to make the review process faster and to update the content survey to be more specific.  Anything else? I have to send some emails promoting the demo to see where it goes and to see how much traction the demo brings. The main game is currently being worked on, and I would say I'm around 50% done with the main flashbacks at this point. It will be interesting to see where the game goes from here, since before the game wasn't being shown in the Steam Discovery Queue, but once it does start being shown there, it will be interesting to see how much of an impact it has on the overall visibility. 
Read more