[WIP] Castle Clark (formerly The Prussian)

[triadtimes]

Alright, your lighting needs a lot of work. I find it hard to believe you'll find someone interested in doing all the 'detail' work for you, but hey that's just me. Either way here is why we don't use box lights to light individual rooms.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3332789/Amnesia/...ot_000.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3332789/Amnesia/...ot_001.jpg

Generally you're better off using entities that produce lights, like you have done, and using a giant box light to keep everything just out of pure black, then using lots of point lights to make your lighting interesting. Look at the stock maps, they're great for learning about this kind of stuff. You're also missing billboards on your windows. Additionally you should keep in mind that there's two mansion sets, so try to vary your environments a bit when you can. Finally, the rubble/destruction in the study is pretty bad.

But enough visuals, lets talk about everything else. You hid a note in a drawer, none of your rooms are labeled, despite being referred to in these notes, and you spawn a monster in the first 2 minutes. These are all terrible decisions. First off, anything relevant to the story (notes) should be more or less impossible for the player to not notice. Second, you refer to rooms by name in these notes and then it's impossible to tell what's what. Third, just don't do this. No player is going to be immersed nearly enough within such a short time for it to ever be worth pulling out one of the biggest scares in the game so early on. Remember how it took an hour or two before you even saw a monster in Amnesia? There was a reason for this. Anyway, it took me a while before I finally got the key to the study, there was very little(?) indication that there was something hidden behind the paintings in whatever that room was, and all it did was dump me infront of another locked door with no indication what I was supposed to do, so I just quit there after checking the rooms over again to see if there was any sort of hint.

There's a pretty good chance it'd be worth scrapping this and starting over and over until your able to create something reasonably close to the quality of the original Amnesia levels, which hopefully wouldn't take too long to learn to do, considering they're all there to examine and learn from (which you definitely need to take some time to do)

Thank you for the tips on lighting, I'll start practicing on that. I've never used the billboards before, so we'll see how that goes. Also what would you recommend for identification of a room? Signs are good but they would seem out of place in the normal mansion setting.

You brought up a very good point I haven't heard before about the notes/diaries in hard to find/uncommon places. Yes this does seem like a bad idea to have storyline-advancing notes in strange places. And really I just wanted to put something behind a painting in retrospect I should have given more indication to that, whoops.

The part about immersion is interesting, yes it takes roughly an hour before you see a monster in Amnesia but I don't think that many custom stories go on for multiple hours. What would you say is an appropriate amount of time for immersion in a custom story?

Scraping the story now would be extremely saddening for me so I think before that happens I need to try and salvage it. We'll see what happens once your ideas are put into play, maybe the story can be saved, maybe not.

In any case thank you for the help.