Hey all,

Firstly, happy one-year anniversary to The Silver Screens! Secondly, as promised last month, I have something special to show today, that being some development screenshots I was able to collect from late March/early April 2020.

Now, these screenshots are not great, solely because these were taken from short videos which I recorded to show friends and family how the game’s development had been progressing.

I cannot talk about The Silver Screen’s early development stage without talking about my previous ‘game’, Castle Chronicles.

Castle Chronicles was never intended to be released, nor really talked about publicly, as it was purely for educational purposes only. It was 1/3 of a group college project and was incredibly simple, you had to look around a medieval village market to find a gold key to unlock the castle. Here is what it looked like:

The reason I talk about this game is because the basic mechanics of the game were used to create early versions of The Silver Screens, namely the player movement blueprint. You can see this in the first early screenshot of The Silver Screens, as it used to have the exact same crosshair.

In this image, you may also notice the player holding a flashlight. This was originally intended to be modelled and used, however, it was very difficult to create a believable flashlight model which did not obstruct the player’s view when walking around, so it was ultimately scrapped in favour of a traditional face-mounted flashlight seen in most games.

The two cubes which you can see are also the ‘lost property'. The mechanics work the same, they glow when near them, press ‘E’ to pick up, except they had no model, and did not glow as much as they do in the final game. Upon picking them all up, they triggered a very poorly placed piece of text.

This next screenshot is a model test of how the cinema chairs would line up. I made it so that chairs and armrests were separate models, meaning that rows of chairs were expandable to however long I needed them to be.

And the next two screenshots are early models of a cinema room, which was again, a test of how the cinema chairs lined up, which is arguably the most important thing about getting a cinema room to look like a cinema room.

And finally, The Shadow. This was interesting, figuring out how it would work was more difficult than you would think. The shadow appears in front of the player, however, what if the player was facing a wall? Make it appear behind them, or what if both the front and back were obscured? Make it appear next to them. These may seem simple to most other game developers, but as I’m sure they’ll know, this was a challenge to overcome as a newbie. Here is an image of the first test of The Shadow appearing. He isn’t even facing the player.

As a jumpscare was not yet made, there would be text appearing in the top left of the screen saying ‘win’ or ‘fail’ if you win/fail to turn off your flashlight.

These are all the somewhat interesting images I collected; however, I do have more information on what the game was originally going to be like.

As you may or may not have noticed, the name in the top right corner of the screen says ‘ITW’. This is the original project name and stood for ‘In the Weekend’. The game was originally only going to be two nights taking place over a single weekend. The title was changed once I decided to have a special third night, however, I started with ‘The Six Screens’, then ‘The Six Silver Screens’, and once I realised both were ridiculously hard to pronounce in normal talk, I changed it to just ‘The Silver Screens’. Good choice.

Once Night 1 had been released, I was facing a huge issue. The game was not fun. My original idea for Night 2 was to incorporate a new mechanic, the first of which I thought to be a generator, which would need to be maintained by the player to keep the cinema lights on. The cinema lights would prevent The Shadow from appearing, however, I realised this would yet again be tedious, and completely pointless if the player had a flashlight anyway.

I had also played around with the idea of multiple Shadows, which do different things to affect the player, such as another Shadow patrolling the corridors, or another Shadow which would prevent your flashlight from turning off. I could not think of any great ideas for this, and they didn’t really fit into the narrative I had wanted to go for either, so was again scrapped.

At one point, I had even thought about reworking the mechanics entirely, having The Shadow patrol around the cinema themselves, and chasing the player once seen. The player could use a camera flash to dematerialize the shadow temporarily to get away, however, they only had a limited amount of these. The flashlight would also have a battery, and the player would have to do their tasks by 6 AM. There would also be a ‘control panel’ mechanic, where the player would have to reroute power to different parts of the building, to avoid the shadow from entering a lit room for example. This would have added much more challenge to the game and made it more fun, and I still like this idea, however it would have required a complete rework of the game and was way beyond what I could have done at the time skill-wise. As I have never completed a somewhat large project before in my life, I wanted to see this game through to the end, and I would have rather done that than attempt to rework the game entirely and ultimately never finish the game, especially seeing as I had already released Night 1 and started gaining a small amount of traction.

And this ends the saga which is The Silver Screens. It’s been an amazing ride and has been truly amazing developing this game, however, I’ve moved on to other things now in my personal life, and likely won’t be developing another game, at least for the foreseeable future.

If you are reading this, thanks for taking an interest in not only the game but how it came to be. This will likely be my final devlog, so I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for making this dream come true. See you around 😊

James