Postmortem - Challenges and Successes:

I wanted to make a spooky maze, where it involved a lurking monster, collectibles, and the player navigating through darkness. I also wanted to add a dumb twist to it by making the monster a bit of a joke. 

The sound integration was a hard one that stumped me at the beginning of creating the game. I had issues where I wasn’t sure if my game was sound driven enough. I had ideas where the monster could be invisible, and would appear when it was close enough to the player. There was also the idea of adding sonar, where the monster would make sounds, but the player was blind, so the player needed to listen out to hear it coming. I also had a whole idea where heavy breathing from the player would alert the monster as well, but I scrapped that idea when I realised the player could easily exploit this mechanic by managing their stamina well, which did not help with the logic I had with the roaming state the monster had. There were also footsteps I wanted to be included in, but I decided not to in the end. I felt it was too much audio at once, and considering the game is about sound, I didn’t want to disorientate the player too much. I decided on making a maze where the monster would have different stages of music; docile, and chase. 

I received help from Ella who made the music, where the plan was to make two themes: docile and chase. Docile was supposed to be calm and slow, and the chase theme would be relatively similar to the docile theme, instead higher, screechier and anxiety driving. I also made it so that at a certain distance, the music would get louder around the player. This itself was helpful for making the player know something bad is about to happen, and to immediately start being aware of their surroundings. Something that also came out successful, yet wasn’t even intentional, were the orbs. They were supposed to be minor side obstacles the player needed to get. I had it so they had light, so it was a little easier to see in the maze, but I decided to add audio for the fun of it. Just like the monster, they had different tracks. One was an idle sound that got louder whenever the player got close. The other was the collect sound, which played whenever the player collected it. That was really important, because it would alert the monster to the location of the latest orb the player collected. What started off as something minor, I didn’t think would become a primary necessity in the end for the game to be more sound driven.