Hello everyone!

It been a week since I released Imminent Impact to the world and I am general happy with the game it self. As you know few years a back I released The Night Is Long which had a lot similiarities gameplay and design wise. I would like to talk about that and discuss about what was my original idea and what made me change it in the end :

Original Scopre

Oriignally when I started developing Imminent Impact it played exacly like The Night Is Long just in Space. My goals with this new game was to make something shorter and not as big as the previous one. I work on it alone after all.

My first design for Imminent Impact was to make a survival horror game inspired by Dead space , Resident Evil , Amnesia games that take place in a small Space ship. The first Design had weapons and robots that want to hunt and kill you and also a Monster that appeared occasionally and chase you though the coridors of the ship.

After a while I thought to my self that the game is not long and the level is not big and having the weapons doesn’t really offer anything to the experience. So I decided that I wanted to focus on a diffrent experience which in my opinion made the game more fun to play.

So I removed the weapons and also removed any pickable items (Weapons , Ammo , health) and focused on the Horror part of it. I wanted to make the Player not be able to defent himself which creates a more creppy and terrifying experience which is what I wanted it to begin with.

This led me to focus on the gameplay and design which in the end created a better more fun experienced.

Jumpscares and Random Events

In previous game I also had few jump scares and random events that happened occasionally. I took this system and remade it and improved upon it. This time around I have some jumpcsares that happened all the time but I also have a lost of events that happen occasionally randomly thoughout the playthough.

But I didn’t want this random events to become too frequently and in the end break the immersion so I added some randomness to make sure every playthough is diffrent. I personally feel that this sytem that I created in The Night Is Long had the right idea but it was poorly executed which I improved it immensely this time around.

Inventory System

Another aspect which was original in the night is long which I copied over was the Inventroy system. In the begining of developing Imminent Impact I had a full fledge inventory system where you pick items and then you could Inspect them or use them. For example when you wanted to unlock a door you would Interact with the door and then Inventory would open. After that you woould have to select the right Item ( Key ) to use it.

This concept although was working well, it didnt really fit into the gameplay of this game and I decided for a better experience to ditch it and instead I made it a lot better you just pick the item and use it automatically and only show you have it into you Hud.

UI

Another Idea that I wanted to do when I started working on the game was to make all the UI elements in the game part of the world. Every HUD element would be part of the Mask the player wears. Every door has its own Lock / Unlock symbol. I tried to make almost all elements in the game part of the evnirontment instead of just being part of the Screen.

Final Thoughts

Generally I learned a lot from The Night is Long and although I took the same formula I feel like I improved it and made a more enjoyable experience for everyone. For me it was really fun working on this game and I lean a lot, espessally when it comes to keeping the scope small and actually make features that blend well together instead of just make million of diffrent features that dont really fit together and in the end makes something that it is not managable.

I hope everyone enjoy this little postmortem of my game.