Week 9 – Hidden Rooms

This week I have worked with the rooms and I have continued my work of adding details to them. Since I already have gone through this process in an earlier post, I will focus on explaining how I created the hidden rooms and my thoughts about them.

The anticipated idea of the hidden rooms; when the player goes beneath the wall the hidden room will become revealed. In the hidden rooms the player can find treasure chests that contain textiles that can be used to upgrade the characters stats.

We in our group wanted to encourage and reward exploration in the game and we believe that the hidden rooms will contribute to this. We made the first hidden room easy to find so that the player doesn’t miss it and comprehends that there will be additional hidden rooms throughout the game. We hope at least that the rooms and the content of them will encourage the player enough to continue discovering parts of the game world.

Description of hidden rooms in the game: To be able to find the easier hidden rooms in the game I had to come up with an idea that would match the overall concept of the game. So I made it look like there is a tear in the wall, and a path that leads towards the opening where the hidden room is. For the first room an exclamation mark will appear above the avatars head, this will indicate to the player that there is something particular interesting with this part of the world.

However, as I mentioned earlier we want to encourage exploration and having it too easy to find the hidden rooms would make the player lose the feeling of exploring while playing. And I assume that it wouldn’t be very rewarding to find the upgrades if all the rooms were easy to find. So I created a few variations of how the hidden rooms will look like. Each design of the rooms is supposed to reflect how hard it is to find them.

I chose to make one that only has a path on the ground. I used the same sprite here as for the first room. I just rotated and scaled it so that it would fit in with the surroundings, afterwards I changed the opacity on a few of them to get even more variety.

I made one that has the same style of the already mentioned tear in the wall but added a seam over the opening. For these hidden rooms I decided to take away the path leading to them, to additional create a challenge for the player. And it looks like this.

These two “designs” are supposed to be quite easy to see and find and I think they turned out pretty good so I am pleased with the results.

The last one is one of the harder rooms to find and it looks like this;

The player will understand that there is something special about the room but will not be given any more indication where’s the opening in the wall is. So the player will be forced to too search in the entire area to find the opening of the hidden room.

That’s all for this week, have a nice weekend