June 2022

Welcome everyone to the first devlog for my game, very exciting process to be going through and especially with this first devlog.

In this devlog I will be discussing the decisions I made when deciding things such as the story, game engine, etc etc along with outlining plans for moving forward with these devlogs and the schedule I want to get into.

Why horror?

Well horror and particularly psychological horror has always been a massive interest of mine. I've also never really enjoyed jump scares in horror games so naturally I took a liking to psychological horror, the idea of having jump scares be what fuels a horror game has also felt off and cheap, true horror should rely on atmosphere, sound, character, and just overall world building.  Horror also allows for a whole new range of stories and themes to be explored through gaming that otherwise wouldn't be possible

Story

The story of Astrophobia revolves around you being sealed into a small space ship orbiting a dead moon tasked with controlling a rover through a series of caves to take photos of select locations.
The decisions that lead me to pick this as my story is not just due to the inspiration taken from Iron lung but also cause it allows me to use it to my advantage in designing how I immerse the player in the world of Astrophobia, the disconnect between the player and the rover will allow for multiple things to be happening at once. more on this later (in the world of Astrophobia section)

Why godot?

The reason I decided to go with godot instead of any other game engine is for quite a few reasons. first off, I just like the engine and find it quite easy and straight forward to use. The engine also works really well for indie games and in my case, games with a retro look to it. The engine being open source and having a great community is another aspect that helped seal the deal as it would allow for me to work with other people in the community to help pinpoint and solve any issues I might be having in my project.

The world of Astrophobia

As Astrophobia is a psychological horror game theres going to be a big dependence on atmosphere and world building, I intend to do this not through characters but much like Iron lung, using  visuals and more particular, what you cant see. by limiting what the player can see and only using sounds or things that only appear in the distance for a small amount of time allows players to feel like they saw or heard something but not sure what, causing the player to think of all the possibilities of what it could be. this is what I believe to be good story telling and world building, Astrophobia will take full advantage of this and use it instead of forcing everything in the players face to build a world that is immersive. Now going back to what was mentioned in the Story section, the disconnect between the player and rover allowing for multiple things/threats to be happening at once. since the player is in a ship orbiting the moon that the rover is on it will allow for multiple events to be taking place at once, such as sounds being heard around the ship while being distracted controlling the rover and more.

Camera system

The camera system inside of Astrophobia will be one of the key aspects to the game as it will be how players will be able to take photos and progress along with helping them position themselves in the world.

The current system for applying noise works but isn't perfect, would like to find a way to make a more effective filtering system in the future to allow for more properties to take place.

Checkpoints

Checkpoints are another crucial system in the game, it acts as a save point of sorts. if the player crashes the rover then it will respawn at the latest checkpoint reached. This has been one of the more straight forward but time consuming systems to implement as it requires quite a bit of coding and logic to take place.

Landscape

The landscape of Astrophobia so far is pretty basic as I'm in the process of laying out the design of the cave as seen below

in the future once the layout has been designed I plan on adding shrubs and other objects around the cave to make it more immersive and for it to feel like an actual cave

Future plans for devlogs

For the future after this devlog I plan on having a devlog every month, within the first week of the month.  June wont feature a devlog as this is going to be classed as the June devlog but come July the schedule should be stuck to.

B = L