Hey! A bit late but here's another update for Reflection~

After the Beta release, we've worked hard on fleshing out the features we promised. Now for the Level Up Showcase, we have most of what is to come. Have a look! If you're curious about exactly what we've updated and stuff, please check out our Executive Summaries!

User Interface

First and foremost, we changed up the UI from previous builds to be a lot more consistent now. The 'E' key now is primarily for items, whether picking up or using. The 'F' is primarily for interacting with the environment or even to look at stuff too. The 'R' is now for reflecting to distinguish it from 'E' now; also since this is our main mechanic, it has the right to have its own key. :p. 

Pressing 'Esc' now opens only a pause menu that outlines the player's controls in case they forget and a diagram showing how reflecting works.

We've also added a new cursor and made it so interaction icons cascade at the bottom. The player can now even see the icon of the currently selected item they could use. Playtesters also let us know that it was hard to tell if they were clicking on certain objects, so we added Object highlighting for most Pickups and Interactables that would be confusing (or the player would need hints for)

Journal

We've extracted and polished up the Journal into its own functionality now. When the player presses the 'Tab' key, they can toggle the journal UI. There's a more pleasant to look at Journal that now behaves like a binder of pages.  The player can view pages now and have them read back to them if they have audio.

We've made journal pages into images rather than text. This allows us to create pictures, and diagrams the player can collect too but that's for the future.

Atmosphere

A lot of atmospheric changes have been made since the initial Beta Release. We've tried to mitigate motion blur but the issue might still persist. The lighting has been updated to be a lot less scary. One big change is the addition of windows with trees in the background.                     

Gameplay

The gameplay has been refined and all of Dad two's functionality is done. Other than that I've been experimenting with other functions as well. Most things should be added and moveable. There are not a lot of bugs at the top of my head, just a few weird dialogue lines that will get fixed once we get the actual dialogue.

What's Left

Creation and incorporation of the Dialogue will be pretty huge. We have our own Briana working on the voice of Millie, we're hoping to have Emma be the voice of Millie's mother, and either a fellow music student or our own Aidan be the voice of Millie's father. Excited to see how that will happen!

Objectives functionality is added to the game however we did not have enough time to incorporate it everywhere. So, I'm holding off on displaying the Objectives until they're all made (just to not confused the player why there aren't any after the Main room)

Without spoiling too much, we have the ability for the player to run through the whole game until the end. However, we do not have an ending yet. This will mainly be something for the Art team to make as well.

Music is not yet incorporated but we will do that in the coming weeks too. Also, more sound effects for everything would be nice.

That's all for now! Thank you for following the development of Reflection

- Zuhab