Development Log: Haunts and Monsters

Greetings everyone!

Over the past week our duo team made substantial progress on the haunts and monsters in Mansion At Midnight. For those unaware, the basic game loop of a multiplayer game of Mansion At Midnight goes a bit like this:

1. Round starts, all players are locked in the mansion. They must search for an item to help them escape before time runs out
2. One of these items is cursed and when a player picks up this item the haunt will start.
3. Haunts are based on the item that is cursed. For instance, if the Bloodstone is cursed, the player who picks it up will become a Werewolf.
4. At this point, the players that where not cursed (survivors) are given a set of tasks to complete to win the game, and escape. Likewise, the player who was cursed has their own set of objectives to complete and win. The objectives *are different for each haunt* with the goal of defeating each other with wits, combat, and strategy. The winner will emerge victorious, and the games can begin again.

As you can imagine, with multiple different haunts (5 haunts planned for the Early Access launch, and 10 haunts for the full release) to complete with their own unique win conditions, this meant a lot to set up and connect to work properly from server to host while integrating multiplayer. While Don, our programmer and lead designer, was hard at work making connections to complete the multiple haunts, I was working on making sure the stars of the show the monsters looked and worked their best for the game.

These are some of the Monsters you will transform into if you are the unfortunate (or fortunate, if you want to fight your friends) player to be cursed.

With the haunts well in progress with testing and finishing touches to complete, we wanted to turn to our roadmap for launch and give you all an idea of what we have left to complete the game and launch into Early Access.

Early Access Launch Tasks to complete:
Player death and respawn
Player shout location ping
Player damaging enemies
Update player models and animations (Making excellent progress, but still not finished!)
Update and add enemy models and variants
Create the Haunt Manager
Monster abilities and transformations (We are still working on some finishing touches here)
2nd pass on all particle effects and audio
Objective UI
Connecting to Steam for easy peer-to-peer multiplayer
Testing and debugging

We are confident that we will be able to complete the remaining tasks and launch Mansion At Midnight into Early Access before the end of October. Although we are unable to promise an exact launch date, we are optimistically working towards October 25th, 2024 for Early Access on Steam. After the game has launched into Early Access, we will begin a new roadmap for completing the game with you - the players!

Mansion At Midnight is Game Grotto's first attempt at online multiplayer, and we know that there will be much to learn, find, and improve while in the Early Access stage. This is the main reason we wanted to do an Early Access launch, so that you the players can help us improve by finding bugs, sharing glitches, and even just sharing the game with your friends to get their opinion on the game. We want to work with the community to make a game that you enjoy playing and can play freely with no adds or micro transactions, perfect for a Halloween party or a night to unwind and just have some chaotic fun.

We hope you look forward to Mansion At Midnight, and the updates to the game that are to come.
Thank you for reading
- Meg (and Don) Game Grotto dev team