Greetings comrades! We, a collective of student game developers, are engaged in the creation of an audio-focused, Cold War-themed stealth game called Shadow Lab!
For our Beta iteration, we focused on improving gameplay and guidance.
What’s new:
- We added a new player-object interaction system, so players can interact with objects in a variety of ways
- Added objectives
- Redesigned our maps
- Added more story elements
- Added more Cold War theming
- Made the lab way cooler
- Removed sound mimicking
- Changed our game name from Sleeper Lab to Shadow Lab
- Added more memorable story moments, animations, and voice overs
- Improved the echolocation feature: interactable objects glow
Motivations:
- Improve player gameplay experience:
- Players were often confused on what to do when starting in the level, so we focused a lot more on player guidance through different means
- Before, players could only press to interact with objects
- While we had an overarching storyline to players it felt a little unfinished. We tried our best in this iteration to make the storyline integral to the gameplay.
Looking ahead, our plans for the forthcoming iteration include:
- Continuing to theme our levels
- Improve audio levels and settings to give the player a more immersive experience
- Fix small guidance issues such as the discrepancy between E to open images and Enter to close them.
- Make small fixes to the UVs and other slightly broken parts of our map.
- Make a title sequence that will play during the power outage and a credit sequence to play while the player travels through the tunnel
- Add an environment outside the tunnel to give the game a more satisfying ending.
- Fix soldiers’ movement and attacks to be more threatening
- Theme our UI more
In solidarity, we stride forward toward the realization of our vision!
Check out and play our game here (beta version)!
~note - for mac builds if it doesn’t work, then try cd-ing to the folder and typing in “xattr -rc *.app” into terminal.!
