I managed to find the chest after a little while, but the way i did it felt pretty random. I basically turned left and right after each step and then shot the sonar to check if there where any openings. The landmarks are a good idea, but i found them to be pretty useless in this scenario, because of the 90 degree character rotation.
I believe 90 degree snap rotation doesn’t hold any merit, it is more confusing than anything else. The reason is simple. Whenever something is diagonal to your current position, you will hear it dominantly on one side (eg right). When i now turn 90 degrees to the right, it will suddenly snap to the left side. This behavior is super confusing, and basically destroys the chance of tracking the relationships between the objects, especially for more than one. Because of that i’m loosing orientation constantly, and the landmarks are not really helping.
You might be able to mitigate this, by creating a kind of turning “animation” that slowly rotates to the side, so i can keep track of the objects (as if i where turning my head), but the snap turning would still be kind of tedious. I think you need to decide, if you want a first-person perspective, with 360 DEG rotation, or a fixed top down perspective, where left and right never change, and where the character then just walks to right, without turning the camera essentially.
Another thing is the missing footstep sounds. It’s very strange to move and not have a feedback sound. Especially in a grid based context, this would give me much information about the length of the current corridor i’m in, i would have the ability to count steps, and estimate where i am in relation to landmarks for example.
The sonar is a good addition, but would improve 2 things:
- Sound Design: i would really have a different sound when the sonar comes back, so i have a clear indicator when it hit something. You could simply do it, by pitching the same sound 1 octave up for example.
- You could expand the sonar a bit, to make finding the branches a bit easier. I would add a sound to the left and right, if it finds an opening there. That way i could listen for where i need to go next, because constantly turning left and right which each step is not very enjoyable. I’d rather have a “listening challenge” to see where i need to go. Then i could focus on finding the path, based on the landmarks, instead of just brute forcing the solution.