You understood our idea perfectly, which actually makes us really happy! Your post is a very good elaboration of our initial concept with the 2 horror levels.
You raise a very good question. This is my second game jam as a programmer. In my first one, I aimed for a hyper-casual game. I usually want a complete presentable project that I can take away for my portfolio, so scoping was extremely important and we spent a whole day on planning. Our idea spawned off of the V/H/S movies, which we also watched in our downtime to get a better understanding of the different horror elements. Personally, for me, I go for smaller ideas and a possibility to combine them because it’s easier to program; write modular code then reuse it.
This was also our writer/designer’s first time writing for a game. So short, self-contained ideas also gave them room to explore the elements better. We had a very good understanding of each other’s work where the writers gave me room for technical development and vice versa. Considering this, we would likely have come up with the same outcome but perhaps with a more polished product (less bugs, better graphics and QOL changes). It was a conscious decision to make smaller tapes to keep within the game jam’s time frame which worked out as a happy accident in a way. We did have more ideas that we never got to, which we will be adding in later on. Therefore, at the end of the day, things would be slightly different if we scoped this with a better time frame, but not vastly.
I hope this answers your question well. I’d love to connect and talk about this in depth if you like. The horror elements and game mechanics you used within your game were very memorable for me and I’d love to know your process as well.