Crouching Landlord, Hidden Camera

Is that reference still even remotely referenceable? Who knows.

Happy Friday folks & on to week 2 we go! Week 1 went mostly pretty smoothly, but stumbled greatly due to poor judgement on how long writing up all the pages & formatting them into Unity would take. But the whole point of this is to learn, so... success?

This week, I'm aiming much lower in the writing side of things & much higher on the technical side. Finding a balance over the coming weeks is going to be key, so we're aiming for reasonable low visual fidelity, simplistic writing & all focus on the gameplay.

This Week's Game

I'm drawing inspiration from two games I played many years ago: NUTS & Beholder for this week's entry.

In NUTS, you're a wildlife photographer trying to track down some extremely organised squirrels, using stationary camera angles that record throughout the night, & then viewing the footage in the morning, repositioning the cameras for the next night, & repeating until you've found their stash.

Beholder is one of the many games that took inspiration from the wonderful Papers, Please with regard to its government job/difficult moral choices setup. Specifically, in Beholder, you run a block of flats & you're responsible for keeping an eye on your tenants, reporting any untoward behaviour & watching them get carted off to the fictional gulag. You could of course choose not to report them, but then you brought hardship on yourself instead.

For this week, Love Thy Neighbour (title I'm going with for now) is lifting the premise almost wholesale from Beholder, as you'll be a landlord of a block of six flats & have the duty of reporting on your tenants, however it's going to be mixed in with the functionality of NUTS.

Beholder was entirely set in 2D & you had to spy on your tenants through their keyholes etc. Love Thy Neighbour, however, is 3D & will allow you to place hidden cameras anywhere in your flats during the day, paying attention to the angle & position of the camera itself, then watching the live feeds of these cameras during the night.

This will (hopefully) allow me to create complex evening routines & make the player really work hard to get all the info they can from each flat before time runs out.

Now, To Make It

I'll be starting work on this fully this evening, with some basic scripts & outlines of character movement, as well as flat design. I'm excited to dive into this one, desperately hoping I haven't set myself up for too much work.

Time will tell!

Tim