itch.io

I played around even more with trying to feed her students and noticed a few things: the grab seems to act up the most on stairs, around corners, and when hugging walls. Take these observations with a huge grain of salt, because they are mostly just from memory and gut feeling rather than measured data, but I do get the strong feeling that I have weird grabs more often in those cases. On the stairs I feel like she'll bypass nearby students more (and sometimes feels like her range is longer), when me and the student are really near a wall it feels like she's more likely to run around the student before trying to grab me than when we're in the open, and while almost all of the weird corner interactions have happened while at least one of us was on stairs, there was one time when she grabbed me through the wall around the corner before even fully coming into view (and with a student between us). Also noticed she'll often lose line of sight when hiding closely behind a student and this can cause her to behave erratically, meaning you have to ensure she keeps line of sight while chasing to ensure reduce chances of surprises happen, which is kind of dangerous cause it means staying farther from the student.

As for adding more students, I mostly meant it as an optional slider type of thing, to let the player increase or decrease the student count to their preferences. If you want to ensure that the player gets the intended experience from the game, and worry this will interfere with that, it could be something you only unlock after a successful escape or the like. Obviously its up to you how much you want to let the player deviate from the core design, but just going through these comments I can see a lot more people than just me enjoy playing the game in alternative ways (such as trying to feed the pred all the students) and are wanting various options that'll allow them to customize the experience a bit to suit those playstyles. There are a ton of simple things you could give the player the option to tweak (such as number of students, escape chance, etc.) that would go a long way to allowing players to set up scenarios they can have fun with, and, again, if you are worried about that hurting the experience you can always lock it behind completion requirements. Just something to consider, since I think the game is still shaping up good without it.

That being said, I also don't think a few more students would make the game THAT much easier. I've got only 3 successful runs so far (would have been 4 but I got impatient and made a dash for the exit without determining her location, only for her to come around the corner while I was in the hallway), but in all but one of them I found the exit key after opening around 8ish doors, and made a swift escape long before the student population could be decreased by much. In my experience if you aren't purposefully hanging around the other students (which can really harm your ability to search) they aren't at all reliable as emergency meat shields either, since you have to be close to them to even have a chance, grabs are finicky, and it feels rare for them to be particularly near the pred. A few more students might slightly increase the chances for you to have one nearby in an emergency, but I feel like they tend to both avoid the pred and clump up a bunch, so might not even do much on that front. The biggest effect of having more students means more sacrifices to stall for time with, and intentionally baiting yourself to feed her your fellows with is a risky strategy, so allowing the player to do it a little more often doesn't feel like it'll break the difficulty. I think I said it in my last post, but, while I do think the current student count is completely fine for balance purposes, I also think having more fodder could be pretty fun, especially for alternative playstyle (though if its through an optional slider that also lets you decrease the number that'd be best I think).

Oh, and thanks for the speedy reply, means a lot when devs do that.