Okay, honest feedback here, our game obviously has it's own flaws but this was a very improvable experience.
I spent 20 minutes of my life finding boxes in giant empty spaces, no difficulty other than losing myself in the place due to a lack of landmarks, there was that map but it was really difficult to decipher, It felt very frustrating not finding the last item as it was the only one left to pick up. I decided to go out since there was nothing else to do and started roaming the exterior until I saw a janky figure coming my way, it was more silly than scary, the sound design was 2 -3 sounds looped so I will skip that.
In conclusion I think that the base approach of the game was very ambitious for the team to catch up, it gave a good "The cube" vibe tho.
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You can be as brutal as you want, i appreciate the feedback. Below is a bit of an explanation if you're curious of how everything went.
We knew that there were issues with the map as we had them in our original paper prototypes that we made on day one and no revisions were made to the design. Unfortunately, all of my own focus was put into making the game mechanics since I wanted to learn c++.
I definitely couldve handled it better and put some emphasis to the team member responsible for it to change it. The creation of the map itself took a day which was more than expected so they ended up never getting to props.
Now to my own mistake, i worded the description of the objective wrong. I should've just said find all the items to win to keep it simple but I noticed in one of the playtests after launch that it confused them.
The enemy was also a bit of a last minute blunder. We wanted to make use of a really nice model but importing into unreal presented a host of issues and broken animations, during the last hours of deadline i just grabbed whatever i could off of mixamo and made it work.
Thanks again for the feedback, we are working on a new build with everything fixed once we are allowed to get it uploaded.
The intention is not to be brutal but honest, the concept is good, the bad thing is the execution and the scope for the project.
In our game most people can't exit the first room because of the safe puzzle being too abstract, we are aware of that and we can iterate upon what we have done but only because the level design and game design was made with 2 weeks of anticipation to the start date of the jam and the scope was big and small enough to fit a 14 people team developing the project.
What I've learned in prior projects with smaller teams is to try to narrow down to the essential mechanics and to use the narration/story/lore as a context or glue to stick all the other things together but not the foundations of the game unless the game is a visual novel or a game extremely narrative-oriented. The project has to be adapted to what the team can do, not the other way around.