Well it’s been a crazy week, likely to be followed by an even crazier one. It’s kind of astonishing how much we’ve managed to pull together in this time. There’s still changes we’d love to make, and we’re getting into that scary point where we actually have to say no to some of them. Fortunately, the biggest and baddest are pretty much out of the way, so most of the small stuff for now is going to be polish and tweaking. There still are some weird mechanical fixes, but there were always going to be with this game. The number one priority right now is combat feedback, a large portion of which is my responsibility for this week, as I’m working on sounds.

That and narrative have been my two biggest focuses of this past week. I’ve finally gotten to spend a significant amount of time focusing on the mask text narrative. It’s a cool process to be able to build that sort of system, that responds to player actions and decisions in such a way, and I haven’t even gone any deeper than whether they’ve found the main level objective (the key) and are thusly on their way back through. Players are responding very positively to the mask text, which is a very good sign considering that I hope to add situations this week where it responds to enemies they’ve killed, and a number of smaller situational conditions based on rooms and paths they’ve explored.

This week also heralds the addition of inventor dialogue, which is now for the most part all recorded. I will have the chance to review it with Kate and rerecord if I need to, but the team is overall very happy with the content that I currently have recorded. Kerry’s doing such an excellent job, she sounds just like I imagined this character sounding. The plan for implementation is that the player will hear this somewhat cryptic musings from a couple rooms off. If they move towards it and reach the room it’s coming from, they’ll see a floating mask that the words are coming from, which will quickly turn towards them and drop to the floor. It’s very much an atmospheric thing that will hopefully greatly enhance the atmosphere we’re already promoting.

We replaced Absorb entirely. It wasn’t reading well with players, and we realized (a little late) that the power is almost completely passive, and just isn’t doing what we wanted it to. The ability taking its place is called Anchor, and it’s similar to absorb in what we’re pretty sure are the ways that are working. The player uses it on a physics object in the world, which then draws all nearby objects towards it, before blasting it away with a shockwave. It will presumably be useful in situations where the player has to create a distraction, or

Sounds are tricky, and a big part of the feedback package that we’re still wrapping up. We’ve fixed our combat system, so players have to hit the enemy’s mask, or grab it off their face to kill them. I spent a good deal of time on the sounds that play for either of those, since they have to be fairly satisfying. Enemy sounds were also made this week, but are still having some readability/effectiveness issues. Combat is the key to making this work I think. We already have a fairly unique and interesting combat system, our movement is fun, our mask is good, and anchor is shaping up to be something really dynamic and interesting. Making sure players are having fun (and a little frightened) fighting with Phantasms should hopefully give us a fighting chance at the show.