In the Dark V 1.0

This is a lock and key, maze, and horror game made by using Bitsy with 160+ rooms. The objective of this game is to find the keys for each floor to traverse further throughout the game.

Story:
Your name is Victor James. One night, you are driving home from a bar and you come up to a dead end. You notice that there's a mansion that's never been there before. You get out of your car and head to the bridge to see if there's a way around. You eventually walk up to the entrance of the mansion and notice that the door is open. Once you walk into the mansion, the doors lock behind you. Now that you're trapped, the only way out is to find the exit from the mansion.

More story elements will be given throughout the play through.

Cat:

At the start of each floor, there will be a cat in the room. Talk to the cat to see which keys you have. This helps keep track of which keys you pick up since there's no way to add an accessible inventory in Bitsy.

Secret Rooms:

Some blocks along the wall may look different from the others. These blocks lead to secret passages

Mechanics:

Find all the keys for each floor to traverse through the door.

Find all the special keys per floor to power up each elevator to advance to the next floor.

Master Keys: Only in the backyard. Find all of them to beat the game.

Foggy rooms: These rooms look like a solid block; however, certain blocks show which path to take. These blocks will be different from the rest.

Portals: Portals can take you anywhere so be careful.

Backyard: Use the portals to traverse each room. No portal sets you back to different floors of the mansion.

Liars: After finding a couple, you'll come to realize that liars have the same model. Once you recognize them, you'll know who to trust.

NPCs: Some NPCs give you story based dialogue. Some help you get through the mansion.

Dark Room: You won't be able to see the walls in this room. There is only 1 dark room.

Hint for floor 4: It's very easy to get lost here. Two keys are in one of the edge rooms. The edge rooms can be very dangerous. Liars have infested the edge rooms. Warning: These portals in these edge rooms can take you anywhere in the mansion. The elevator is also in one of the edge rooms. Floor 4 is just a big rectangle. Once you know the dimensions, you can figure out how to traverse the floor.

Changelog V 1.0 (Final Build):

Added a teal key to the first floor.

Added room to first floor

Locked right door in starting room

Purple key now unlocks two doors

Added Alex into purple key room

Fixed locked door dialogue. You now know which keys unlock which door when unlocking the door

Fixed dialogue for elevators when going back up a floor.

Fixed dialogue for NPCs when doing an action and not talking

Added a way to see which keys you have by talking to the cat at each starting room per floor.

Lowered music volume again and made it loop in a better way

1. According to my burn down list, I feel like fixing all of the dialogue mixes in with the critical section of adding more dialogue. Some of the dialogue didn’t make sense or seemed like the NPC was talking when they were actually doing an action. Adding a way to see which keys you have wasn’t in my burn down list at first, but I would put this into ambitious. I didn’t think it was necessary to do this, but I had extra time so I implemented this into my game. I also would categorize locking the right door in the first room of the game to be important. This door should’ve been locked from the start because it makes no sense to be able to walk right to the elevator at the start of the game.

2.

I am very pleased with where my game is at. I had a very ambitious approach, which I did not realize before it was too late. Having six levels of my game took a lot of time, but I stuck with it and I achieved this goal. I also wanted a story line in my game, which I achieved. This was added towards the end of the development (the beta version) because the levels took so long. The one thing I enjoyed the most about the design process was creating unique rooms and developing multiple ideas to push the limitations of bitsy. There was one thing that I planned on adding that just didn’t work and that was the transitions to each room. For some reason, every time I tried to add a transition, the screen would go black during testing when moving through rooms. The transitions wouldn’t work. I tried on two different computers and each transition would turn into a black screen. I even made a new bitsy file to see if maybe the hacks I was using were interfering with the transitions. The transitions worked for this test file, so maybe my game ended up being too big and the transitions just broke. I also made a draft in itch.io and uploaded my game with a couple transitions to see if the transitions would work, but I had no luck. I looked this issue up on google and I still found nothing. Another problem I had was adding music to my game. I originally wanted each floor to have a different song. When I tried to do this with the hack I found, the music just wouldn’t play. So, I found another hack that lets you use one song throughout the entire game. This ended up working, but I wish I was able to figure out how to change the music for each floor. The easiest thing to develop for this game was the rooms. I would make a random tile and use that tile as the walls of the room. Also, there wasn’t really any coding at all, other than if statements, which made the development process quicker and easier so that I could add more content. Even though there was no coding, I made over 160 rooms, over 120 NPCs and added in much more, which took me many hours. One thing that took me longer than I expected was making the rooms with all of its features. Making the rooms is one thing, but then I needed to add exits and return exits, lock certain doors, make sure each room was unique, add NPCs to most of the rooms, etc.

Changelog V 0.7 (Story Update) (Beta Build):

Added many NPCs (120+)

Added a lot more dialogue

Added a story

Lowered the music volume

Fixed walls in one room of the backyard

Changed color of room on fifth floor

Fixed spelling mistake on floor 3

Added lore to the game

Changelog V 0.6 (Alpha Build):

Added more portals

Added 14 rooms to floor 5

Added 12 rooms to the backyard

Added 4 keys and 2 special keys to floor 5

Added 4 master keys to the backyard

Added Music

Added sound effects when picking up keys

Floor 5 and the backyard are done

Reworked secret passages

Changed Red Key location to middle of room (first floor). Room location for red key has not changed

Closed off most of the open areas where doors are

Changelog V 0.5:

Added 20 rooms to floor 4

Added 18 portals to floor 4

Added 18 Liars to floor 4

Added 5 special keys to floor 4

Floor 4 is fully finished.

Future plans:

Allow a better way to see secret rooms. This allows the player to see secret paths more easily.

Add transitions to rooms to allow easier navigation

May change red key location on first floor because many play testers have walked past it and can't find it.

Fixed a bug where there was an empty block in the first room in the mansion.

Changelog V 0.4 (Skeleton Build):

Added floors 4, 5, and the backyard

Added one key for each new floor

The game can be completed from start to finish

Future Plans:

Add more keys to floors 4, 5, and the backyard

Add more liars

Add more NPCs

Add more rooms to floors 4, 5, and the backyard

Known bug:

Pink key on floor 2 disappears when walking into wall in entrance where sun key appears. To fix this, stand where the entrance is for the sun key area and press down or up to trigger the pink key to come back.

Changelog V 0.3:

Added third floor. The entire third floor is playable

Added more keys to the third floor

Added two special keys to power the third floor elevator

Added a few NPCs

Added a Liar

Changelog V 0.2:

Added second floor. The entire second floor is playable

Added four keys to second floor

Added two special keys to power the second floor elevator.

Added one NPC

Added Portals

Added Liars

Fixed an issue where the secret passage for the blue key is blocked

Changelog V 0.1 :

Added first floor. The entire first floor is playable.

Added five keys to first floor

Added one special key to power the elevator

Added two NPCs to help  you progress through the floor and to get you started with the game