Welcome to GenScape’s final blog post! We started this week by making a number of last-minute changes and additions that we felt would make our experience the strongest it could be. For game mechanics, this included making the candles into reality checks finally, and having both candles and papers trigger their effects when the player touched them, as opposed to when looking at them. We also finally added text to the papers that appeared legible from far away, but was revealed to be only randomly shifting letters on close inspection. On the art and sound side, we finished fully implementing the cave environment with its final assets, and put in the final versions of all of our dialogue lines for the frame narrative. Finally, we finished out our emotional arc by creating a second, surprise ending for our game in which the shadow figures from the dream invade the real world.
With our experience definitively finished, we then put work into preparing the physical space of our room for festival, as well as into planning how guests should best experience our game. We made space for two guests to experience our game at a time, each in a swivel chair for ease of movement. We then constructed a wall out of posterboard and fabric to both create a waiting room, and prevent potential players from seeing spoilers ahead of time. Finally, based on some last-minute playtesting in which our experience really sacred one of our playtesters, we decided to give players a light warning before our experience, to avoid ruining the festival for anyone who really hates horror.
Alongside this, we prepared the slide deck and script for our final presentation. We recorded a full length video of a final playthrough (which will also be good for our archive), and then cut it down to a 4-minute demo that would fit in our 15-minute presentation. We then filled in details about how we had developed our art style and our mechanics, as well as what we had learned about making our emotional arc as effective as it could be.