Corner cases

So now that I have a coherent vision of the game, I finished the first level (which will be a tutorial level really, nothing much is going on). Interesting fact: I made this based on the house of another, childhood friend of mine, with slight modifications. I don't know why, but that house is the default one when I try to imagine what other houses look like. Perhaps this friend represented to me what a 'normal' family would look like? This seems the most reasonable explanation, but then again, I have no way of being sure. I'll stick with it, though.

So after I have added the last few little touches (texts on the walls, that hint at the general aura of the whole game; also added the music for this level. I have all the songs I want to use, downloaded from incompetech - royalty-free music ftw!), I've asked a friend to look at it, while I could watch him play (Teamviewer 11 gives a very good user experience, if you have a good enough network connection, I can only recommend!), and I made a few notes. Afterwards, I asked for his input, and then talked about it.

So, as it turned out, I need to rework the shades, or somehow I need to make it more clear to the player that he needs to avoid them. Or that they hurt the player. Or that the blur effect is supposed to mark how afraid the character is. Or that darkness is to be avoided. He had the idea that there could be little words flash in and out (not too visibly) in the dark areas (words like "fear", "loneliness" and stuff). But then, why not make the shades become these floating words, instead? I think I'll go with that idea.

Another problem was that at the starting room, one could easily "die" by accidentally going backwards, into the shadow. He suggested to remove the nightstand from next to the bed, and instead put a shelf in the opposite corner, which could provide a clear hint at the player that shadows are bad.
But this problem also presented itself at the end of the level, where there is a bed, and if you go too close to it, you enter the shadowy part, which means death. Since I check the player's center point against the lights, and not the whole model, this gives unrealistic results in these corner cases. My friend suggested to use areas where this "feature" would not activate. Which seems like an easy thing to do, so I'll keep this suggestion in mind. (Another solution could be to sample not from one point, but from many. I'll need to explore these slutions sometime.)

And minor bugs, of course, because game development would be just plain boring if you wouldn't need to fix shit all the time.