I made a cover for The Horror at SSAYIB yesterday. I didn’t make the spine or back page yet, but I did make the front cover and I’m quite happy with it. The only reason I have the other three covers for Big Duck, Boundless Normality and Swift Flags is because I had a spur of the moment idea to have physical copies of my own games. I did the same for my legacy music up until Auditory Boosters. It was very cheap how I did them. I didn’t have access to a printer back in 2018 (or I might have with my mom but I had a different idea) and I just went to the library down the road from me and used their computers to print them off. I think it was like 20p per page or something which was fine. You might ask yourself why I didn’t just use printers at school. Well, they were unreliable for some reason and I never managed to figure out how to print things for myself, otherwise I would have. Anyway, for my music I just got some old CD cases from my mom. Sorry mom, but I did actually take ones from your shelf that had stuff in them! But I preserved them by putting them in a plastic wrap thing I think. I did intentionally look for ones that you might not have listened to for ages. Not sure what I used for the game cases? Maybe just some random PC games that I didn’t care for.
Anyway, this game was originally in my legacy games collection for clickteam. But I thought to myself, why is it even in there? It’s one of the newest games I made and it’s practically finished aside from the options screen not being the best and having a few unused buttons. So, last night I moved it out of the legacy and onto the main games page. I wasn’t really sure what the cover was going to be, so I just started by putting the logo on it firstly. Then I was a bit stuck. My other covers always had central ideas or visuals, so I leaned into this with a dark office pointing a flashlight on the door. It looks alright I think, but I do think that the other covers are better made, or are at least simpler.
I would definitely like to overhaul some parts of the game though. I think remaking the office would be nice to make it more faithful to the actual office that it’s based off. Also adding moving animations when looking around the office, and a camera pulling up animation. I don’t think it would be that hard to do. You could just overlay an active object that acts as the animation and only have it visible when you move across the office, then make invisible once the animation is up. Also, instead of having the view switch as soon as you mouse over a direction to look in, it would firstly play the animation, save which direction you’re turning to, and once the animation is up then you’d actually move the view to the intended direction. This would solve overlapping objects during transition and keep things consistent. Might even add a new hallucination. Currently there are two hallucinations. One for turning off the computer screen and another for the phone jamming. Maybe I could add one for the door area which requires you to keep your camera staring at the door for a set amount of time. If you flick away without staring, you die. This would make that view of the office more important. I did add a vent which made that area a bit more versatile, and its where you access the cameras, but that’s about it. Other than the vent, there’s no real threat or point to lingering around looking at the door when you could be closing NCRs or keeping the phone in check.
It is a really hard game on max difficulty though. Setting all 5 options to 20, you firstly have the extremely restricted flashlight view, similar to FNAC 3’s laser pointer mode. Then, you have the enemy moving nearly every 3 seconds, being at your doors in as little as 9 seconds after starting. The NCRs pile up insanely fast, having no slowdown at all. The phone line is almost always ringing. Hallucinations are very frequent, making closing NCRs and shutting the phone down a drag.
You could in theory just leave the phone, but that drains power, and I’m not sure if you can survive a night with the phone on constantly. I just had an idea, maybe having doors lock only after 1 second after you clicked lock, like FNAF 3? Maybe.
Screw it, it's 16:24 and I decided I'm gonna try and learn more GoDot when I get home. I wish future me luck!