Look Behind postmortem

Starting idea

I started this projects with the idea to build a game around Boo's mechanic from any 2D Mario game. How they approach Mario when he looks away, but freeze when looked. In these games, normally Mario just doges the Boos like any normal enemy, and if the player actively looks at them is because either they are waiting for an external event to happen (like a platform getting near enough) or keeping them from populating the middle of the screen in an elevator section.

I thought that it would be interesting to have an activity that explicitly prohibits the player to look at Boo (the creature, from now on), and the creature being an active element in impeding the activity to be completed. This activity came to be the arrow input sequences, mechanic that I took from a previous RPG prototype I made, which I took back them from Helldivers II's stratagems. This led me to the idea of the player having to operate a computer, restarting the systems of a ship to fix a blackout. I started feeling this project was going towards something like a thriller, or some suspense/tension in general. A guy alone in the dark, fixing the computer while they has to watch out for the creature, as it approaches more and more.

Design specifics

So, I had the basic elements. A creature approaches while you fill a progress meter. If you look at the creature, it freezes. But that wasn't working, because while you look you can't operate the computer. Looking was just delaying the inevitable, and it was wiser to just focus on the inputs. To addres this and after some iterations, I came up with this:

• The creature gains speed over time. Looking at it resets the speed to 0
• To avoid milisecond-fast peeking, the creature moves back while you see it. Now the player has a reason to keep staring at it.
• To avoid the creature going back forever and losing the sense of risk, while the player is turned back, the meter progress decreases slowly.
• Whenever you turn back, the current input sequence is lost

With this I hoped to create a loop where the player has to calibrate priorities. Is it worth to finish this sequence, or do I stop the creature, as it is gaining more and more in speed?

As working on the computer and looking away are disjoint actions, I wanted to boos that feeling by placing the look behind buton in the mouse. Most of people (right-handed) have the mouse and the arrows at the reach of the right hand. So, unless some juggling is made, you have to move you whole hand to alternate between actions. I think this added more tension.

Ideas left behind and final thoughts

I had some ideas left unimplemented. At some point, the lights were going to shut down, so now the player couldn't see the creature unless it turns around (the character was going to have a helmet with a flashlight). I haven't made lightning with Godot. It seemed easy but didn't had the time. I also wanted to include a final section where the super long sequence appears and the creature enters rage-mode and don't stop even if you look at it. I tested it, but I felt that with the assets I had the time to make, the idea wasn't being communicated properly.

This last things, not good enough assets and animations,  and not enough tweaking with parameters such as creature top speed, back speed and sequence length, made me feel like the game wasn't feeling like suspense or tension at all. It was more like a fancy juggling between priorities to complete the task. Which I isn't a bad thing a suppose, but it wasn't the original intention. I feel like it fell short. However, I think that the elements work in paper, and maybe, with more time an tweaking, and better animations, it would have been more similar to what I initially thought.