Nov 1, 2026 · Hollow Ward
Teaching the player to hide
Floor one has to teach surviving a threat without a fight. A walker that never attacks, a locker with a louvred view, and a failure that costs nothing.
By the end of floor one the game has taught movement, the flashlight and batteries, the inventory, documents, keycards, a fuse puzzle, the pipe and a keypad. What it has not taught is how to survive a threat, and floor one currently ends on a locked door. The finale I agreed on is built to fix both.
Fixed roles for the enemies
I decided the enemy roles early and wrote them down so they stay consistent. The walker only stalks on floor one, to teach hiding, and never attacks. The crawler does the first real attack. And the player gets the gun before any fight with walkers.
The nest and the first attack
Once the power is back, the east door is ajar: something went through it. Inside is an alien egg, resin on the floor and an overturned trolley. Picking up the bolt cutters triggers the first attack. The crawler drops from a ceiling vent, a hit darkens the view and slows the player, and two or three pipe hits drive it back into the vent.
Hiding
After that, a heavy tread comes up the corridor and the walker sweeps slowly toward the player. A tip says to get into a locker and close it. Inside, the view narrows to the louvres, the flashlight switches off, and the player can only look.
The walker pauses outside the staff room and moves on. If the player is caught in the open, it stops, screams and approaches slowly, and reaching a locker in time still works. On floor one it never touches her. If it reaches her, the screen goes dark and she wakes in the staff-room locker: a soft failure with no damage, so the lesson is “hide better” rather than “reload”.
The chain
The bolt cutters earn the way out. The fire door at the bottom of the stairwell is chained through its push bar, and with the cutters the prompt reads “Cut the chain”. The chain drops, the door opens onto darkness, and floor one ends there.
What I cut
A planned thread about the ring that starts the story was dropped. On floor one she is only trying to get out and work out what is happening, and she would not be thinking about the ring. Cutting it kept the floor about survival and confusion rather than a fetch quest.