What exactly is the objective?
Added 2022-07-29 04:31:08 +0000 UTCYou hear a deep humming down the hall. You call for your friends, but there is no response. Concerned, you drop what you're doing and run to find the source of the deep whirring. As you round the corner, and the deep humming begins to shake your body, you see it. A giant, red pill.
(This is the test enemy.)
Besides that, I've been setting up the levels with doors and lights that can be powered on and off and the objectives and overall structure of the game--generally what Phase 2 is about.
Now, some game design talk:
Currently Lethal Company's core gameplay is designed to be a time management horror game in a similar way to FNAF, forcing you to "juggle" defending from multiple attackers--or to describe it another way, it's a game of "horror whack-a-mole" spread out across a large map, in which the moles will escape and terrorize you if you don't get to them fast enough.
But whereas FNAF has you always sitting in one place and even cranking a jack-in-the-box or shutting doors remotely through your tech, Lethal Company will force you to run around and do those things within physical proximity.
While this objective emphasizes teamwork AND splitting up to maximize efficiency, it also solves a deeper problem which I attempted to explain in a previous post a couple months ago. I've tied the main threat to the main objective players will be most preoccupied with. So horrific monsters aren't a nuisance randomly intruding on your chores; rather, they are the consequence of your failure.
I want players to feel as responsible as possible for any horrors they face. Thus, they must believe that encounters with monsters are avoidable. I want them to say in their minds, "This was not supposed to happen!" (The only other time I think I accomplished that was with the "Hide And Seek" mode in It Steals, where you could avoid triggering the monster if you avoided finding it. But let's just say Lethal Company's version of Hide and Seek is a bit more honest.)
