Explaining the ”Noise maker”

This week I’ve been working on completing our design documents since we got a few comments on our first hand in.
The picture above is the image I made to briefly explain how one of our usable items will work. The Item I’m referring to is the ”Noise maker”. This item is meant to be a none-violent alternative to the rest of the players arsenal. It’s supposed to be a single use item which emits sound circles that will draw away guards from their original position/patrol path.

The sound circles are used in almost every step of the game, walking around creates smaller sound circles, sneaking removes them, using weapons (especially the gun) creates larger sound circles and the noise maker creates circles equal to the gun. These circles represent the sound made by everything in the game and helps show the player from what distance guards will hear the sound and go to investigate.

What the image above represents is:

The first image depicts the player seeing an enemy guarding the objective and throwing the noise maker to the opposite side of the room.
The second image shows an example of how large the sound circles emitted by the noise maker could be, and also shows the guard hearing the sound and starting to move towards the source of the sound.
Lastly, the third image shows the guard standing by the noise maker, investigating, while the player is able to sneak past towards the objective unnoticed.

Other than what I’ve explained above, I have also worked on other things for our design document, mainly a few minor corrections that needed to be made and further explanations of some specific things. I also made a quick drawing showing the movement patterns of our patrolling guards, as well as marking out the objective and exit. It had to be done since we previously had no visual explanation of how the level looks or what the guards potential moving patterns might be.

Just today (Thursday) I also had to continue working on our level, adding in new objects, trying out revised environmental sprites, now made to look darker, to better fit with our visual aesthetics. Previously the game was far to bright to be able to be taking place during night time.

All in all this week has consisted of a lot of smaller tasks put together, becoming time consuming. As soon as we get our AI’s to work properly I will probably have to rework the guards patrol patterns and positioning to make it more balanced again.