Hey there, Ghost Hunters!
Welcome back to our Weekly Update, and Happy New Year!
We hope all you Ghost Hunters enjoyed your holidays with family and friends.
The team is returning to work after some much needed R&R. We will prove that 2020 will indeed be the Year of the Ghost!
Without further ado, let’s continue showing off some new features in development
A dark gloomy night falls upon the Asylum, silently awaiting new patients to come fill its empty beds.
One of our core focuses during the development of Midnight Ghost Hunt has been providing enough content and replayability.
Replayability can be accomplished in a number of ways. A satisfying progression system and daily/weekly challenges with unique rewards are a solid way to do that. Obviously a large selection of maps will help here, too. Maybe even custom maps! These are certainly being explored for the final release.
While we aren’t quite yet ready to discuss these features yet, we do have a new feature to share with today. It’s a system that will ensure no two games are identical.
Dynamic room variations!
An example of a room variation. Left is the classic default, right is a new room layout you may encounter randomly.
Many players from previous alpha tests have noted that once the Hunters memorize prop placements, they have a significant advantage.
A common request has been to add some sort of randomization to the props to solve this problem.
That’s exactly what we’ve done!
Each room now has a large set of prop layouts to be chosen at random, and each room is independent from each other. This means there are a huge amount of potential variations for each map, and it’s unlikely you would see the same exact Mansion twice in a row!
Generally, these layouts are hand-crafted to look somewhat realistic, instead of fully procedurally generated. That might look like a mess, really. It just picks one out of many presets for each room.
We’re also nudging props a bit on top of this, to create another layer of randomization.
The Hunters must ask themselves: is that chair moved because a Ghost moved it, or did it start that way? We hope this will create more moments of hiding in plain sight.
We also have set up “wildcard” props that can randomly select one prop from a pool of possible props. Sometimes it will be a lamp, but other times it will be a potted plant.
We hope this will contribute to an overall sense of unpredictability that will help Ghosts find better hiding spots and prevent Hunters from just memorizing everything to their advantage.
That’s it for this week, Ghost Hunters
Thanks for reading about our new randomization system! Coming to a Midnight Ghost Hunt alpha test near you soon™.
How do you feel about these changes? Have you seen instances where a similar mechanic really improved the experience of a game for you? We’d love to hear about it so we can perfect ours!
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