The Game is Almost Ready for the Alpha Release

Over the past week my work consisted of redesigning the game's map. Instead of attempting to design every element of the map from scratch (which would have been more work than necessary), I got a package off of the Unity Asset Store that came with a bunch of prefabs. This made building the map much easier.

In order to design the map layout, however, I first had to figure out how multiple aspects of the game would play out, for instance:

• What characters will the player face when trying to escape the hospital? Where will these characters be located and how will they prevent the player from escaping? Where can the player move to on the map to avoid having to interact with these characters?
• What kind of map would be the most interesting? Obviously a map with one straight hallway would not interest the player. Being that the game takes place in a hospital, I made sure to put multiple rooms and even designed rooms that will eventually resemble operating theaters. (These rooms are empty right now but they will get filled with 3D models to better reflect a hospital later on in the development process.) 
• Where should the keys be located? I realized that I didn't want to put the keys out in the open because that would make it too easy for the player to find them, but at the same time I didn't want to put the keys in places that would be near impossible to find, as this would just frustrate the player.
• Given that the gameplay video for the alpha release has to be between 30- 60 seconds in length, I made sure to make the map big enough so that the time it took to beat the game was at least 60 seconds.

Going forward, we are almost done with the alpha release at the time of this writing. We just need to add a few more things such as dialogue and a timer. We will do this tomorrow.