Dev Log Week 4 - 4/25

This week, I focused on finalizing the main story and goals that I want to implement. The working story is that the player, who plays a struggling writer, rents a cabin from a vacation rental site, not knowing that the person who owns the cabin is a serial killer who uses the rental to lure victims. In the previous log, I mentioned the stretch goal of having an alternate ending. When presenting my pitch deck, one recommendation I found interesting was a way to log the players’ findings. I think that idea would work for the player playing as a writer, getting ideas for a new story. Another idea that was suggested was having the player be able to move an object in her hand. One interesting mechanic that it reminded me of was the totems in the Until Dawn remake in 2024, where players have to rotate totems to find premonitions. I am thinking that the player has to rotate the item or examine the object to be able to log it. 

One of the design elements that I worked on was sketching a layout for the cabin setting. I mostly looked through floor plan layouts to get the shape of the cabin, with one of the images I found being a recreation of the cabin from The Evil Dead. I also started to look for Unity furniture assets on Models Resource, the Smithsonian, and Unity Asset Store. In previous experience, I had to make assets for items that were difficult to find or needed to be customized, such as notes and keys. If something similar happens, I plan to make models through Maya and import them into Unity.