Complete Revamp Progress!

Hey everyone!

It’s been a LONG time since we last updated ‘Welcome to the Chain Reaction’ as far back as July 28 2019.

Since the last update the team has been working part time on bringing a new dimension to the game with a complete overhaul to the mechanics, story and environment to make it a much more refined experience. To do this we have taken a big look at the game as it is and see which direction we want to take the game.

Here is a list of changes we have been working on from the feedback we were provided:

Levont: The Silence is deafening

We liked this feedback as it emphasized the creep factor of the game where there were not many sounds to comfort the player and got them listening for any sounds out of the ordinary. 

To improve on this we now have a new member on the team designated to improving the audio experience along with FMOD to make iteration and editing audio much easier and faster.

Do I ever need to leave the laptop?

Lots of players were confused as to if they had to do anything in the 3D environment and wanted more navigation of the environment and things to physically interact with. This made us think about how players are enjoying the game and how we want them to play the game.

This brought up many ideas - some even from the gamejam! In this case we have started expanding the environment and adding in more objectives that involve navigating the world.

The Monster is pretty funny looking

Although this can subject from person to person as we have seen people be jump scared from it, we also felt the zombies mechanics could do with an improvement to increase the scare factor when interacting with it.

We have now redesigned how the zombie looks and works from the ground up to make a more difficult and interactive experience to increase the tension when it's in the house.

How do I hide from the zombie?

As part of the gamejam we needed a fast implementation to defeat the zombie so the player could continue playing without dying. The approach we came up with was to have the player stare at the zombie until it screamed then disappear for a random set of time.

With the changes to the AI navigating the world we needed a new way for the player to hide/escape from the zombie to continue playing.

The Monster really easy to avoid once you know what to do

Some of these changes include a much more advanced AI that navigates the house ‘Listening’ for the player as opposed to the current implementation where it will appear behind a door and wait for a few seconds before triggering a death sequence.

Another addition is the Zombie will no longer disappear when looked at but instead chase the player until out of sight and then hunt for the player in the area last seen.

TheDoctor seemed too much like a 'phishing scam'

This character acted as the main driver of the story. The original design of TheDoctor was meant to be 'mysterious' and trustworthy in curing the outbreak by using files off the laptop. The reaction from the community was not what we expected and lead towards TheDoctor being someone that you do not trust or want to talk to - even found people wanting to block TheDoctor.

As this game is going to be heavily based on story, we now have a new member dedicated to bringing a more exciting, engaging and rewarding story to the game.

After looking at the current story we have come up with several different rewrites of the story to come up with a more exciting, engaging and rewarding story for the game. As this game is going to be heavily based on story, we now have a new member dedicated to writing a new story for the game to bring it more impact!

Here's some other changes we have made in order to better the game

1. The game now has more randomization so it’s less predictable to play. Text files that you need to get hashes from are now randomized along with the hash itself.
2. The Laptop screen has been resized to work on all aspect ratios
3. Added settings to adjust volume and brightness
4. The main menu has been completely redone

We hope you will enjoy these changes and are looking forward to your feedback!

Cheers,

JamesGames