hedgefield

[Release] The House on Holland Hill

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UPDATE:

 

Version 1.4 is out! Changelog on the page. This is hopefully the last update I'll have to do, but it fixes a ton of things and finally adds (auto)saving.

https://hedgefield.itch.io/hollandhill

 

Original post:


Hey all!

Bit late to the game-announcing game as I wasn't 100% sure I could commit to it, but heck here goes.

A twenty-year-old weird house...
A most memorable maid...
A shadow of something...
The eyes of Luigi.

 

THOHH is a first-person exploration game in which you play as pizza delivery guy Luigi. Through a series of vignettes, you experience the story of the house on Holland Hill, where Luigi made frequent deliveries. It's got a bit of a King In Yellow vibe going on right now, though I'm still working on the details. What I do have is a greyboxed house and a sweet sweet vespa. I hope to hash out some interactive scenes this weekend and really get things going. 

 

screenshot_10.png

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I'm starting to feel the pressure, as I spent a little too much time today setting up the house further. I added curtains, collision to the furniture, and a staircase to connect the top floor to the cellar/carport. I also made the outside lights respond to motion, and hooked up the doorbell. When you ring it the man of the house comes to open the door. All in all I'm pretty proud of how it's looking, I should just get cracking on the actual gameplay now.

 

I wrote a post on my blog with some more in-depth development info and screenshots if you're interested: https://hedgefield.blog/2016/11/26/live-from-the-wizard-jam-front-episode-1/

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Finally got some solid work in on the gameplay side of things today. Got the first scene pretty much done, and I expect to be able to make good progress tomorrow night and all day saturday. I'll probably scrap a few more elaborate scenes and condense the story down to its basics to get it done, but I'm feeling hopeful.

 

Having the character sprites with some expressions in the game does a lot already. (Unfortunately the gif didn't capture the subtitle UI)stairsapproach.gif

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Thanks guys! I'm just punching forward right now. Got about halfway through the game already tonight, though it helps that the interactions in the first half are pretty basic and brief. I probably left some accidental goofs in some of the levels too, so I'm gonna have to play through it all in asshole-mode on sunday to see if it holds up to scrutiny. Though one goof left to the observant eye is intentional...

 

screenshot_15.png


And I posted another expanded progress report on my blog again with some additional screenshots.

 

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Very nice looking game!

 

I only made it to the delivery where the maid answers the door. When she went in to get some money I followed her in and then she came back, talked to me, and locked the door, trapping me inside... FOREVER. What a scary game.

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Thanks! Haha yeah I should throw up a collider for that one maybe. I think I unlocked the sliding door in that level for when that happens though. A literal backdoor.

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I did the same as Henke but the sliding door is locked, I'm afraid!

 

Anyway, this is fantastic. Really confident and effective storytelling with a cumulative tension. Nice visuals and writing, too.

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Thanks so much! And whoops yep I'll build a contingency for that then. You can secretly sneak into the house through the sliding door in Delivery 9 too, but I didn't have time to add much of a response there yet either.

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18 minutes ago, hedgefield said:

Thanks so much! And whoops yep I'll build a contingency for that then. You can secretly sneak into the house through the sliding door in Delivery 9 too, but I didn't have time to add much of a response there yet either.

 

Is that the

sex

one? If so, I absolutely snuck in!

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Ha, yes it is. I wanted Luigi to get yelled at when he gets caught there, but that would probably have to mean some kind of game over state (fired, or at least banned from deliveries, effectively), so I decided to table that one :lol:

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What a cool idea! I liked this a lot.

 

Theres a bug when you sneak into the cellar early on, the door says locked but it opens to an empty room after you click it a couple of times.

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Amazing! As Ben said, super confident. I felt a palpable sense of growing unease throughout, even with some foreknowledge of the plot and multiple playthroughs. A bunch of thoughts that are all spoilers follow:


Loved the bright colors in the couple's clothing during the 'happy days' scene.
I loved the slow burn of the beginning, especially having your lines cut off to reinforce Callum's reduced mental state.
Rosalinde's line of DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING then revealing she's a joke plays off the suspense and is funny and a little stressful every time. 
Damn, the Delivery 11 transition is beautiful. Because of how far away you can interact with objects I would always interact with Rosalinde from the bottom of the stairs after going to look at the cellar door. The impression of staring up at her almost silhouetted by the lighted wholesome room above, the jump cut to the next scene...excellent. I realized that I could go up the stairs, but I think it would be neat if there was a trigger at the bottom, kind of the other half the trigger at the end that stops you at the top when she is running up. This time it is you trapped down there.
Callum's speech at the end is perfect. Well done, man.

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Oh, I forgot to say,

I was expecting there to be something horrible in the food box the whole time!

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My computer has trouble handling your sick grafix here, even on a lower resolution (also, on a lower resolution the hands are cut off and float in the center of the screen), so I think I'll have to call it quits, as it was really hard to play at such a low frame rate and I got stuck inside the house at the first appearance of the "maid"(?). 

 

But this game is really awesome and I'd love to see this structure expanded out into a fuller, richer story, assuming this isn't a fuller story (I don't know how it ends!)

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I think I'm too conflict averse for this game though I did like the two dimensional people in a three dimensional world and the like uh locational audio?  I always knew where the scooter was.

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Oh yeah good point Patrick, I should do some performance optimization for v1.1. All the lights are dynamic (mostly because baking lightmaps is such a hassle) so I can imagine that takes its toll. But now that everything is done I could go back in and figure that out.

 

Thanks guys, I was nervous about getting that story to resonate in such a short time, but I'm glad to hear the moments I was hoping would land did come across.

 

And whoops I'll fix that cellar door! I'm glad I didn't put the thing that's supposed to be in there in the prefab for all the levels...

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Oh, I forgot to say I updated the game a few times in the past week. The latest version adds autosaving and loading, performance tweaks and a host of UI improvements. It also fixes some obscure bugs, mostly related to pathfinding behavior. I also finally figured out how to limit the distance at which the interactions appear, but when I changed it I wasn't sure I liked it, so I left it as-is I think.

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I finally played this today and it was exceptional! I want to play it again to see if/how much impact my choices had, etc. The style you have works great, even though on paper, it sounds kind of weird. There was just enough facial expression, physical variation for me to really feel what was going on. I love the 3D models and the 2D art. Everything is well executed and I didn't run into any bugs. Amazing work for a jam!

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This is pretty good! I like the concept of story through pizza deliveries. I thought maybe I was the pizza delivery guy for Nick Breckon's dark soul streams, but I guess not.

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