Hi, I'm currently working on a CS and I'm experiencing some design / gameplay problems concerning the freedom given to the player.
Imagine an open area, for example a corridor with several rooms and intersections with other corridors. Now you want the player to move in a specific direction or into a specific room. Of course not because of the reason that your script won't work otherwise or he will be stuck because he is missing a key or something like that, but because of the story *forcing* you to do so.
Now you can't simply lock every door because it destroys the integrity and the realism of the environment and even if you did you'd still have your open corridor intersections.
How would you proceed to force the player in the right place?
An example:
You wake up in your bedroom because you have to use the bathroom. You know the exact way to the bathroom, and you don't experience anything unusual. So obviously you would have no reason to wander around in the whole house, exploring rooms and searching through drawers and whatever.
But what if the player decides to look around? It would destroy the whole idea of the need to use the bathroom in the night and it would also kinda bug the later gameplay, where you WANT the player to look around, but know he already knows the location because of his nightly exploring session instead of his nightly bathroom session.
How can you prevent him from acting like that?
- Maybe a advice/hint in the beginning of the CS which tells that you should act like you would in real life?
- Textmessages appearing when walking in the wrong direction? (Like "I have no reason to go this way, the bathroom is the other way")
- Forcing the player away from the wrong paths with camera movement and/or slowing down the movement speed?
I'm quite new into map designing for horror games and these are my thoughts about it. I'm curious about your answers