Postmortem Game Design

Dark Quiet Death (2D) is a 2D top-down take on the original game A Dark Quiet Death which was created in response to the show Mythic Quest. 

The main concept of the game is to place the player in a very minimal setting with very few actions to perform (walk, turn on and off a flashlight, read signs) in order to place more emphasis on the other factors involved in gameplay such as visuals and sound. The biggest feature for the game, however, is the procedural generation which allows for every single run through of the game to be unique and non-overlapping (besides that of the basic gameplay concept which is never changed).

The biggest issue that occurred when developing the game was the instantiation of the different room pieces. Although the core part of the procedural generation worked since the beginning of development, when attempting to instantiate the individual pieces of each room, many issues started to occur such as indexing out of the grid system or pieces being rotated incorrectly. This took up a large majority of the time as the main goal that I had for the project was to create the game with procedural generation in order to give each run through a unique feel as the game would otherwise feel stale and monotonous should the player simply be going through the same maze over and over again with the enemies spawning in the same spots.

A lot of the playtest feedback was also incorporated into the final development of the game as the majority of them involved the tweaking of the flashlight action. In order to address a large majority of the concerns, the flashlight battery was extended 10-times and the fog-of-war that the player could reveal was also enlarged and combined with a new feature that decreased its radius over time in correlation to the flashlight battery. These fixes addressed a lot of the concerns as many of the players felt that the flashlight battery was originally too short and prevented the player from being able to explore the maze enough to understand what they are supposed to do as well as giving them more of an aesthetic feel that comes from the realistic aspect of a flashlight battery dying out.

If given more time, a few of the things that would be fixed/added would mainly be in regards to the assets and the enemies. The enemies would be updated to incorporate better assets in order to add more to the horror/thrill aspect of the game as well as making the tile assets appear more run down and dark to give it more of an ancient and rotting prison type feel. Another thing that would be fixed would be the procedural generation maze tiling as some of the tile pieces do not match correctly with each other which causes walls to end abruptly when they in theory actually need to continue or have a corresponding tile that seamlessly blends it into its surroundings. This would mainly be fixed by revamping the procedural generation code as well as adding an object placement generator that would detect for such situations and instantiate objects to cover up such areas.

Playtest Notes