Apr 28, 2024

Paranormal Home Invaders Progression Newsletter

Paranormal Home Invaders - TheAJ

Woah! A Letter?

Hi, It's been a little while since I gave you, my dedicated audience, any solid news about the game's development. I recently finished working on the Progression module, the second of five modules, and I think it would be appropriate now to share all of the new stuff I've worked on. So buckle up, there's gonna be a lot of reading

The Progression Module

The aim of the Progression module was to introduce gameplay features that gave the game an actual reason to play, other than just relying on how fun the game is to keep your attention. It was a bit of a scary task at first, being what I expect to be the biggest module. The demo's development and Reconstruction module were quiet small in comparison. I did however, against all odds, defeat the Progression module's scope.

The initial development of the module was quiet slow, as I was still recovering from my hospital visit. I wasn't really motivated to work on the Paranormal Home Invaders, and I was just pretty miserable to be around at the time. Don't get me wrong. I really enjoy working on this game; it's got to be in my top ten pass times, but with apparent lack of iron in my blood and the tiredness that may have been associated with the previous fact, I couldn't bring myself to work on the game for long periods of time.

However, after a few weeks, I started to feel a lot better, and development was back at its original pace. On March 6th, I posted my first piece of news for the Progression module, featuring some of the new mechanics I'll talk more in detail about later. And of course, later on In March, I published some more news bits in the form of YouTube videos on my personal YouTube account. These videos however took an amount of time to make that I'm not proud to admit, so I stopped making them and returned to solely working on the game.

However, I still wanted to keep you all updated with news primarily via videos since these posts don't seem to do well on their own due to lack of accessibility to the community tab. So recently I decided that once I'd finished the Progression module, I would upload a short video on YouTube as an announcement, and put all of the real juicy details in a Steam announcement. I didn't really like talking about all of changes I'd made in those dev-logs, so this seemed like a better alternative.

So that's how I got here.

New Content And Features

As I already mentioned, the progression module was very big, and its probably the biggest module out of the five. With that, there was a lot of new content introduced into the game. So I've made a very long list of these new additions along with information regarding there development. Read up!

Levelling Up and Prestiging

The easiest way of providing more playability to your game is by creating a level-up mechanic. Most games have it, it's simple to understand, everybody loves it? There's nothing more satisfying than watching your efforts slowly fill up a bar at the end of a game.

You earn XP by completing contracts. The main source being the main objective, but completing optional objectives and taking photos can earn XP as well. Levelling up unlock new equipment and equipment upgrades for the player to purchase back in the lobby, and would make harder difficulties more approachable.

Once the player reaches level 55, they are greeted with the option of prestiging their account. Account prestige allows the player to unlock cool cosmetics such as a new outfit, badges, and profile banners, that display the time and effort they've put into the game. On top of that, when prestiging, the player also gets to choose one piece of a equipment to prestige. This unlocks a previously unobtainable tier of that equipment, along with permanently unlocking that piece of equipment and all of its tiers. A pretty sweet deal right? Of course, the deal does come with its negatives. Once you prestige, you lose all of your money, all of your purchased equipment, and all of the upgrades you unlocked for them, not including any prestige equipment. But I mean who cares when you've got a new outfit, right?

Through this modules development, I've spent a lot of time trying to make sure that the equipment progression actually felt fun, and not like something that was just holding you back from having fun. To this day, the rate of equipment unlocks, the amount of XP you earn, the amount of XP required to level up, are all being tweaked. It's a bit difficult to find the sweet spot. I am determined I will find it one day.

One mistake I found was that once you prestiged and you had your prestige equipment, if it was something that wasn't automatically given to you like evidence equipment or a flashlight, you wouldn't have any money to buy it to add it to your loadout as you lost all of your money once you prestiged. So I made it so you start off with a bit of extra dosh, so you can at least afford to try out your new prestige equipment once you prestige.

Secondary Equipment

The idea of secondary equipment has been around since the early days of the demo's development. The idea of holding an additional piece of equipment that doesn't fill a hotbar slot. Spite how long it took before I start working on it, it was pretty easy to introduce into the game.

Secondary equipment has to be one of my favourite additions in the Progression module due to its dramatic impact on the games meta. Why bother holding a video camera to check for ghost orbs if you can just wear night vision goggles instead? Why hold a firelight to provide some romantic lighting if I can just wear a headlamp.

Secondary equipment are though, very expensive, especially in the early game. Even deciding whether to buy the head-cam can prevent you from buying new equipment upgrades that are just around the corner. However, unlike primary equipment, you don't need to stock up secondary equipment, Once you purchase them, you get an unlimited supply. Secondary equipment can't be upgraded through regular progression either, so once you purchase it, you don't have to think about how much more expensive the upgrades must be, because there are none. You can however, unlock a tier 2 variant of secondary equipment by prestiging.

Unlike the primary equipment, which will remain as a fixed list for the rest of the games development, my plan with secondary equipment is to slowly add more even after the games release. They're not too time consuming to create either, since they only have two tiers.

My favourite piece of secondary equipment so far would have to be the cross necklace. If you're about to die to the hands of the ghost, you can always rely on the cross necklace as right as you're about to die, the necklace will smite the ghost. A feature I will talk more about later with the crucifix rework.

Truck Surveillance

Another feature I'd been meaning to work on for a while was the truck surveillance. Unlike secondary equipment, it wasn't that I was avoiding working on it, but a lot of issues seemed to pop up the times I previously tried.

Being able to see something from a video camera was a difficult task as it conflicted with the way that the map was display. If you have played the demo, you would have noticed that you can only see into rooms that your either inside of, or that are connected to the room your currently in via an open door, a transparent door, or a window. All of this is controlled using triggers and the player's collider, which meant that I was going to have to get create with allowing the surveillance monitor also control this.

So the way the surveillance monitor works, is that it teleports the player to the position that the video camera is placed; disabling its skin and anything that might allow the player to be influence by the environment it's teleported to. Honestly, it turned out pretty well.

After some playing around I added some keybinds to the surveillance monitor that I thought were necessary, such as being able to lock the camera's rotation, and being able to toggle the night vision off and on.

One unexpected issue I encountered was with the player's collider. I was originally using the player collider to trigger the update required to display the scene correctly. The problem was that if you placed the video camera on a piece of furniture and then tried to use it in the surveillance monitor, you would get bumped by the furniture's collider as the player normally couldn't be on top of it. I ended up disabling the player's collider and made it so that while in surveillance mode, an different collider would be used that wasn't connected to the player in order to update the scene's visuals. And everything's been pretty peachy since then.

The video camera surveillance is only one part of the truck's surveillance UI. Since the last news letter, I've also introduced a map surveillance screen. This allows you to monitor things such as motion sensors, video camera positions, or any equipment that once upgraded is visible on the map. Along with this new screen, I also added a mini-map to the video camera surveillance screen that would show you the map from the video camera's current position. Pretty cool right?

The hardest part of creating the map screen was actually making a shader for the map. I wasn't planning on making the white outlines myself and wanted to use a shader to do that instead. The problem is, trying to create a shader for a UI element is more tedious that I expected. But, spite the answers I found online that seemed to think it was near impossible, I got it to work. Funny thing is, I'm not really sure how. I was kind of mindlessly switching between options and it just started to work. Haven't touched it since.

Player Customisation

With the Progression module, I introduced to Steam API into the game, and I thought it would only be fair to add player profiles into the game. In the lobby screen, In that once empty box that takes up most of the screen, you can now find your profile. Clicking on it will take you to a bigger version of your profile where you can see how much XP you need to level up and customise your cosmetics.

This was less of a difficult thing to add, and more of a mind-numbingly boring thing to add. Don't get me wrong. I love staring at my profile for hours on end. But actually working on it was really lame, since it was really just basic UI stuff.

It's funny, as I would say it was one of the few things I didn't bump into any issues while working on, yet I would also say it was the most boring thing I had to do. A possible correlation? Well anyway, my original plan was to make it so the player would interact with a mirror to customise their character, but I thought the UI didn't look very nice and having to interact with a different object to access a menu was really annoying as well. So I ended up scrapping the idea and went with what I have now.

Crucifix Rework

Before this module, there were a lot of equipment that I wasn't too happy with how they were utilised in gameplay, or rather their lack of. The crucifix being one of them. Crucifixes used to be only used to prevent hunts, which was okay, but there is a contract type I plan on working on in the future that would completely void this function. So I got thinking. "What could this thing do as well?". Thinking back to when I first played Phasmophobia, I remember trying to use a crucifix to kind of prevent the ghost from getting closer during hunt. Obviously I died. But thinking back to this memory, it gave me an idea. What if crucifixes could stun the ghost during hunts. So I added it.

During a hunt, if you are holding a tier 2 or above crucifix and the ghost is very close to you, the crucifix will automatically smite the ghost, filling the room with blinding light that would give you a few seconds to escape. And during this time, the ghost is completely frozen and cannot see you.

I ended up adding an additional optional objective for this new mechanic. "Smite the ghost using a crucifix". Why not, right. It's a pretty easy way of earning some extra XP and money, and it guides new players that don't know about the mechanic towards actually using it.

I think it's a really cool mechanics, and since then I've been using the crucifix a lot more. My only complaint is that it is quite similar to using incense to blind the ghost, the only real difference being that the crucifix gives you a very obvious visual indicator that it worked. But I mean, so what, you can use incense to blind and slow the ghost down, and you can use crucifixes to blind a freeze the ghost.

Sanity Rework

Like the crucifix, there is a contract type I plan on working on in the future that would make the original purpose of sanity, to increase hunt odds, pointless. So I had to come up with something else that sanity would do outside of influence hunt probability.

I ended up making it so that your sanity level also influences your vision. Having a high amount of sanity means that you can see further, having a low amount means that you can barely see 3 metres ahead of you. Not an exaggeration, it does actually get that bad. The way that sanity influences your vision also gives you a method of knowing how low your sanity is without checking the truck sanity monitor.

With this rework to the sanity mechanic, I also decided to give sanity medication a bit more value. Consuming medication will now negative the influence that sanity has on your vision for a set amount of time. Say your at 0 sanity and you can't see far at all, you take some tier 2 medication, and then you can see as far as you would with 100 sanity for 90 seconds.

Flashlight Rework

The previously mentioned equipment and mechanic were only useless in a game mode type that's not even real yet. The flashlight was just useless overall. If you wanted to see things, you would use night vision goggles or a video camera. The flashlight was really just something that needed to be in the game since it was staple in the horror franchise. But, with the newly added sanity rework, I thought of something that could give flashlights a little reason to live.

Flashlights now not only provide light, but also extend how far you can see. So if you have a flashlight active in your hand, your able to see further than if you didn't have one, even in rooms with lights on. And since having low sanity reduces how far you can see now, flashlights could be used as a more long-term solution to combating sanity's influence on vision rather than using medication.

The light from most flashlights before this rework didn't go very far as they were restricted by the max vision at the time. But now that they increase the max vision, all flashlight tiers got a boost to their light range.

This change hasn't made me start using the flashlight every game, but it definitely gives you a reason to actually use it other than, "why not".

Lighter Rework

Lighters have always been a second class equipment. Their only use was to serve firelights and incense, and it bothered me. So now lighters have a new mechanic which I believe makes them one of the most useful pieces of equipment in the game.

A while ago, I had an idea to make spirit box easier. I'd make it so the spirit box would be able to track the ghost, making it easier to get a response out of them. I ended up scrapping this idea though because I thought it would ruin the balance between the evidence equipment. So instead, I added this ability to the lighter.

When a lighter gets close to a ghost, the flame will dim and flicker. How much the flame dims is determined by how aggressive the ghost is. If the lighter is too weak to handle a ghost that is very aggressive, the ghost will blow the flame out.

This new mechanic provides a pretty reliable way of tracking the ghost, while also providing a pretty unreliable way of determining how aggressive the ghost is. Overall, I think it's a pretty cool feature.

Spirit Box Rework

The spirit box has already received two reworks in the past. It's always been a very troubling piece of equipment. Let's call this rework, the one to rule them all. I had actually been planning to do this for a while, like back when I was working on the Reconstruction module, but I left till now.

The big, fat, disgusting, problem that spirit box has was that it didn't really give you any feedback. It would play an audio clip if you got a response, but that was it. Another slightly less hideous problem was that if you didn't have a working microphone, you couldn't use spirit box the way it was intended. I did add a feature that would give you spirit box rework automatically after a while to combat this, but it didn't really feel like it was enough.

The spirit box now has an interface, that tells you when it detects you voice, if it recognised what you said it will then display what you said, and finally, it will tell you in text whether you got a response or not. If you do get a response it will still play an audio clip along with the text. There is also a button on the interface that allows you to switch to prompt mode. Prompt mode allows you to ask a question without using your voice. All you have to do is choose one of the prompts and click the screen, and then it's pretty much the same as if you asked a question with your voice.

The biggest problem I faced when working on the interface was the design. It was kind of difficult to come up with a layout that I liked, which was one of things that led me to pushing this back to the Progression module when I was working on the Reconstruction module.

With all the reworks for equipment, I'm pretty happy with the balance between the equipment. It feels like there is an actual reason to use each piece of equipment now.

Difficulty Balancing

While playtesting from a brand new save. I noticed that I was having a really hard time completing games on professional difficulty. I thought I should then play the easier difficulties since I was having trouble with the low level evidence equipment, but then realised that it would be just as hard to get evidence on those difficulties. At the time, the only difference between the difficulties really was that the harder the difficulty, the easier it was to die.

So I decided to introduce a new factor in the difficulty setting that makes it easier to gather evidence in easier difficulties. It's on a scale from 1 to 3, difficulties professional and harder all having an evidence difficulty of 3. This evidence difficulty influences evidence types in the following ways:

Temperature drops faster
DOTS is more frequent
EMF 5 is more likely to appear
Writing books and spirit box are more likely to produce results
UV evidence lasts longer

Obviously ghost orbs are not influenced by this new setting as I would have to make them harder to find first.

Since introducing this new difficulty setting. I've felt that the early game has felt much easier and more enjoyable to play.

New Lighting and Effects

This one of the smaller changes made in the Progression module. I added a few new interactables that add some new lighting to the game. I also added particle effects for incense and the crucifix, and remade the ghost orbs particle to look nicer. Take a look.

New Location: Edgingfield

Yep. A new location. I got sick of testing everything in Pillow Street so I decided to create the game's first three story house. Two floors and a basement. There isn't too much to talk about it, other than I can confirm that map creation has become a lot easier since the original version of Pillow Street. So... enjoy some pictures of Edgingfield.

(The lovely basement)

(The hauntingly beautiful TV)

(The delectable bed sheets)

One issue I did come across was that the stairs in Edgingfield were a lot smaller than the ones in Pillow Street, and were facing the opposite direction. So I had to add some new conditions to the stairs that would allow for the tiny stairs of Edgingfield to work properly.

Final Thoughts On Progression

The module went well. It did take a lot longer than what I expected, but I chalk it up to the time I spent recovering from my hospital stay. I expected this module to take about two months, and it only really took a little longer than that. But other than that, I am really happy with the current state of the game.
The new levelling system along with all of the new reworks and the brand new location, give the game a lot more content to play with. And in the end, that was the goal of this module

What's Next?

The progression module is the second of the five modules required to complete the full release. I have talked about the contents of all of the modules in the past, but I think that was in one of the in-game news feeds a few months ago, and I'm not actually sure if anyone saw it or not.

So here is a general outline of the full release modules:

Reconstruction: Rewrite a lot of the code and improve the games foundation to make future development easier
Progression: Introduce levelling and progression, along with new a variety of new content such as equipment tiers, secondary equipment, and reworks
Invasion: Provide a complete rework for the ghost behaviour, introduce a new contract type, cursed equipment, and more locations
Photon: Introduce multiplayer, more locations, and possibly more...?
Clean Up: Prepare the game for release

It's actually kind of a secret, but I've already started working on the Invasion module. It's quite exciting, that the game has reached what I see as the halfway milestone. My most recent work has been dedicated to the ghost behaviour rework. I won't spoil anything just yet, but I did leave out the small ghost reworks I made in the Progression module as I thought they felt a bit moot compared to the more recent changes.

I don't think the Invasion module will take as long as the progression module, due to its smaller scope. But honestly, who really knows. I didn't know I was going to have a bowel obstruction back when I working on the Reconstruction module, so who knows what might happen while I work on this one. I can only hope for the best.

Closing Words

I hope this has been informative, as I really tried to fit everything I could remember in here. Like, I didn't even mention the bug fixes. As for the video announcements. I only plan on releasing them alongside these newsletters from now on, since they take too long to make.

That's all I have for now, if you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments. Bye bye.