Hour Cycle - Afronomical/Producing-Games-24 GitHub Wiki

The game is delineated into specific chunks, refered to in game as "rounds", or "shifts". These rounds and shifts occur on an hourly basis. The shift doesn't take up the entire hour, and only lasts ten minutes both in game time and in our time. The rounds begin at the beginning of the hour, every hour, and are structured like this because wandering the halls for too long risks angering the demon. Each round is divided into a few chunks of gameplay, although the player won't be directly drawn to the seperations between these, although they are likely to notice them.

Start Of Shift

The shifts start with the player in the study. The timer hasn't started at this point, and the player has access to the computer, to buy items from the shop, and to check the CCTV cameras (although the specifics of the Cameras haven't been decided fully yet, and will be covered somewhere else.) The player can use this time to strategise, and will also get information about any patient who has wandered off from their room at this time on their pager. This is the down period for the player, and a calm in the gameplay. Any items they buy during this time will be spawned in the level in random locations.

Shift Proper

This is most of the game play, and starts as soon as the player leaves the office. They then have ten minutes (Open to rebalancing) to complete all their tasks, find any random tasks, and try and find clues about the demon and possesed patient. At any point, they can interact with the study door to immediately end the shift, and be in safety, but they have no safe space without this (there are plans to implement a difficulty option to allow the player access to the study as a safe room during the level, but that will be covered elsewhere). This provides the player with an option to end the shift early, avoiding danger, but risking their tasks, furthering the players incentive to get all their tasks done as fast as possible to gain access to safety again. If the player runs out their timer, the player will enter a time period here refered to as the "shift end". Throughout the shift proper, some events may be tied to time, so whatever mechanism tracks the time passing needs to be accessible from anywhere if possible.

Shift End

This occurs if the player runs out the timer in the shift proper. During the shift end, the demon enters rage mode, and the dead patients do too. There may be changes to the states of these entities as they enter this mode, like the entities knowing where the player is by default, but that is a matter of balancing. The other main change is that all the patients doors will lock automatically as soon as the player is out of all of the rooms, and the tasks will no longer be completable. There is no benefit to the player of hitting this mode other than the chance to figure out what patient is possesed. The way to leave this state is to get to the study.

Study Door

This is not really a phase, but when the player confirms they want to end their shift at the study door, this is when the game updates the sanity system, and then the hour system, to update game data, and trigger any events for the next hour. This should either not be a loading screen, or it should be the only loading screen in the game, but either way the behind the scene triggers need to happen here and be modular from any of the rest of these phases, so that if we need to we could move it somewhere else, or have alternate triggers for it.

Capture

This is similar to the Study Door phase, and could possibly be the same thing, if that makes more sense. When the player is captured by the demon, they should have the round ended immediately, and while they shouldn't get any time in the study, the sanity system, and then hour system needs to be updated, as well as a heart attack roll being made against each patient to see if you killed one of them.