Original Plans

While the current version of this episode is fairly simple, my original version was not. While the original version still had the concept of sneaking out of the cabin while avoiding the bad guys, it was a much larger cabin and the bad guys were not stationary.

My original plans called for a rather large cabin that contained a number of interconnected rooms with two or three floors. Many people may think that such a cabin is not realistic and that the cabin portrayed in this episode is much more realistic, I have relatives who own cabins and some of the cabins along the lake are quite large (and probably should be considered houses not summer cabins).

The original plans would have had different rooms with the game presented like episode 2, except going into the wrong room would result in death. Having half a dozen or so rooms was a fair bit of work, especially if I wanted to make each of the rooms unique. As is usually the case, the problem of development time came into play so I had to make a decision as to which alternative plan I should go with.

The first alternative was to have a generic room and rely on the player to go through a maze of generic rooms until they came to the bathroom. Alternative two was to make the cabin into some type of 3D maze that the player must navigate. As there was already a maze planned for episode 28 I really did not want to take this approach. I finally decided that I would limit the cabin to a small one and simply have the bathroom being the only room that the player could enter and the other two doors lead to the player's death. Thinking that the new approach sounded like my deadly doors game, I renamed the episode to Deadly Doors. For those who are wondering, my first consideration for the sub-title was "Cabin Fever."

When you think about it, the alternatives would have taken the player longer to solve but the actual puzzle that made up the episodes were not really that much more difficult.