Endings, Saving, and Deadlines

So it's Friday the 13^th, and nothing seems to be going right for me today, at work or at home. Nevertheless, things must still move on, and that means another update on Project Silence. For the most part, there isn't much to report here this week. There are no new pictures here to show of what I've been up to, because I've been working on the endings of the game.

 

The endings, for the most part, will be cutscenes where the only player interaction will be having to hit the “ACTION” key in order to move onto the next line of text (and even then, that may change). One difference, however, will be the one semi-playable ending. This ending starts with a cutscene that has multiple branches. Picking the wrong answer will end the game there, either right away or further along a path of nothing but dead ends. Picking the right answer will continue to move the ending along to its completion.

 

This (indirectly) leads to the next topic we will be discussing. The game will be missing a certain feature, the ability to save on your own. This has been something I had been think about long before I made the decision to make a 2D Project Silence for release. There is a reason for it, and there will be a way to save, I just won't be whenever you want.

 

Today's games will save for you, sometimes every minute or so, and it is laughable at best. Then you have the classic survival/horror games that inspired Project Silence. These games featured areas you could save, but only if you found them. Admittedly, some of them were closely spaced together. Other times, however, required you to backtrack to one central location of the map in order to save, provided you survive the trip (look at the map for Nowhere in the original Silent Hill).

 

As such, Project Silence will have single-use “checkpoints” found after major storyline areas. Want to save the game? Then make sure you select “Yes” to save. Don't care about it? Then hope you don't regret it. Depending on how you play, it could be some time before you see the save spot. This may change depending on how QA and beta-testing goes later in the year, but for the time being I would say you can consider this written in stone.

 

Speaking of “written in stone” it's also time I bring up another behind-the-scenes aspect of the game. There are many features that I would like to have in Project Silence. Some of them, such as the multiple endings that I'm currently scripting and the voice acting, are features that I will push back the release date in order to have in this game. Other things, however, are not so set in stone. The deadlines for these, however, are set in stone. One of these deadlines is quickly coming up.

 

As the picture in the second post on this blog shows, a map for a building can show multiple rooms and hallways connecting them. For some areas, that may be all and good. Other times, however, it can reveal something before it should be revealed. I was looking for a way to stop this prior to moving on to building the many indoor areas of the game (hence the work on the endings), and have yet to find one that will work. Provided one does not appear by March 1^st, the idea will be dropped and instead each room and hallway will be a different map. This will lead to more files and possibly a much larger file-size in the long run, but for the sake of the horror element, it will be needed.