Capstone Project:
Group Size: 9
Development Time: 2 Quarters
Project Type: Game
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Roles:
Game Designer
Level Designer
System Designer
This is my capstone project for my Game Design degree at SCAD. This was developed in about two quarters or 20 weeks, with a team of about nine people.
With such a small team, I had to flex into many different roles.
But here I will only go over some of the Level Design, and Game Design I was responsible for.
Along with an encounter with our monster that I designed and created.
Reference Images
The Challenges
During the process of developing this game we encountered many different problems.
With the biggest being how to make the game actually scary.
I have personally never been a fan of horror so this was by far the biggest challenge for me.
Level Design
The first challenge that we faced was designing levels that are actually scary.
We initially were maze referencing casino floor plans but found two problems with it.
1. It was to confusing for player and they would offend get lost in the slots machine's
2. Having that many of your slot machine's in a small area was casing a lot a performance issues.
So we decided to switch to the playground layout
Layout and Design
2nd Level
Early Block Outs
After creating these initial level designs, we couldn't really figure out why our game wasn't that scary.
But after looking at other horror games, mainly Alien Isolation SOMA and Resident Evil 7.
We found that more claustrophobic levels are much more successful in giving players a sense of dread when exploring the environment.
But at this point reworking and redesigning older levels was not possible, so our solutions was:
1. Keep the big open floor plan but make the actual play area much smaller
2. Breaking line of sight as much as possible so the player doesn't know what's around the corner.
Completed Levels
Game Design
We also decided to plan out our scares much more.
Originally the scares we're going to be random events that the player would encounter while exploring.
But we found this was extremely unsuccessful at actually scaring people.
So, we decided to rework our scares and plan out when they happen.
For this I created a beat sheet to see what areas are missing scares, and to see what systems we would need for them.
Besides the level layouts and the general flow of the player I was also responsible for creating one of the encounters with the game's monster, the Siren.
The basic design principal for the encounter is the player has to make it through the hallway while avoiding the Siren.
Initially the encounter was designed where lights in the hallway would be flickering and at certain intervals the siren would appear when the light is off and then disappear when the light is on.
And if the player got too close to her, they would be killed.
After some initial testing we discovered that players would either walk through the hallway and completely avoid the siren.
Or get killed by the siren but get confused because they didn't see her.
So we decided to rework the encounter where throughout the hallways we would add casino chips and if the player picked up a chip while the Siren was nearby, they would be killed.
Obviously, this still led to situations where players ignore the chips and just walked through the hallway.
But we felt that most likely players would go through the hallway and pick up as many chips as possible and most likely died to the Siren.
Then eventually threw a little bit of trial-and-error figure out how to pick up the chip safely.
Trailer