Capstone Reflection #2

Hello and welcome to my Capstone blog post! This is a required reflection that I use to track my progress over the first 15 weeks of my senior Capstone game development project. The time of this reflections marks passing the first third of the fall semester and I honestly have no clue where the year is going its moving so fast. We have already challenged step two in our program, meaning, after 3 weeks of active prototyping of ideas we have settled on a game concept to move forward with. Flashlight Noir (working title) is a first person horror puzzle game set in a haunted carnival where you are trying to find your lost child, all the while being chased by a mysterious carnival monster. While in this carnival the player will discover the world bending around themselves as they try to navigate and figure out their child's fate. Their only ally is the light, revealing hidden information and piercing the greyscale world around them with color as they make their way through the haunted terrain. This is obviously a very early outline of the games story but im going to use it to answer the reflection questions.

For this piece, look at the game idea (or ideas) your team has chosen from the perspective of someone outside of your team. Why would someone else think this idea or ideas were worth pursuing? If the idea or ideas become a game, what will it contribute to the world of games?

From a outside perspective, this game has a lot going for its genre and style. First person horror in the last decade has been on the rise of popularity and quite a few games are recognized as ether technological or stylistic achievements(Alien Isolation, RE7&8, Outlast) so the market is lucrative for our concept and is has a great possibility to thrive. Our game also is very addicting in the sense it challenges the player in a dynamic way. We brought a beta version of our game to testing that had our monster Ai along with a simple maze for our testers to... well test. From our QA results, our testers were committed to completing our small level, replaying up to three times, to make sure they got all the collectables and secured that sense of competition.

On the other side of the coin the genre of first person itself is overdone and if we choose to focus on the shooting aspect of our game it could easily get lost in the sea of FPS story games. This also leads into the second question, I don't see this game offering a lot to the world of games. In my mind our game could only affect the world of games in two ways, mechanics or story. In mechanics I don't think our light mechanic of bringing color to a normally greyscale environment is enough on its on but combined with a very intelligent monster that reacts to the changing colors and brings the fear to the player, it might be enough. As for story we don't have a narrative designer at the moment but if we prioritize that when we enter our second phase of production im confident we could forge a solid ground for them to up build from.

Thank you for reading and I hope to have a demo video of our current build up soon, see you soon!