Single-Player First-Person horror game set in a 1950s submarine, where you play as a crewmember trying to maintain the submarine and escape the light-sensitive sea creature that is onboard, seeking to devour you.
UE 4.24 Trello Project Management 6 Persons Team 8 Weeks
Design Process
Brainstorming
Through brainstorming with other 2 core teammates, we developed an interesting idea where we mash multiplayer cooperative gameplay against an AI enemy with darkness and light mechanic where the players must manage the light system to upkeep machinery until the submarine surfaces. For visuals, our artist wanted to explore clean visuals of Inside and Limbo, and the setting to be inside a narrow 1950s submarine.
Research
For research, I explored games that share similarities with our concept, starting with Call of Cthulhu games, the recently released ones, and the classic Dark Corners of the Earth.
Management of resources, visual story-telling, and ambiance were great inspirations for our concept.
We were going for a multiplayer party game where players must avoid the monster while finding tools and upkeeping machinery for a specified time to win. A similar game was already on the market, called Deceit, which also has light-sensitive monsters (albeit player-controlled).
Pitch Presentation
After 2 weeks there was a green light process where the teachers would choose the most promising projects based on the pitches we present. All teams covered their scope, feasibility, and demand for the product, as well as the core gameplay loop(s). Three of us that worked on the pitch all worked off of each other and created a pitch that looks how we want our game to look, which we were proud of.
Each team received a rating for the pitch, with our team scoring the highest.
Implementation
As my first experience in level design, it was a terrific opportunity to learn how
important vision and metrics are, and how to build levels that are scalable and that can have features removed and still be functional (as some of our features were cut).
The first version of the level was far too large, players didn't feel like they were in a submarine, as I focused too much on gameplay and little to none on the look and feel. My level design guidelines were based on Deceit, the number of entrances to rooms, length of connectors, and circular design of rooms and areas.
The second version was far more focussed on the feeling of the cramped space of submarines and received positive feedback. It was too narrow as we had collision issues and our AI was struggling to use it, so I established metrics and decided to create another iteration.
Combining the ideas of the two levels, and using excellent set-dressing tools our artist made, the feeling of crampiness was kept while having more than enough space for players to traverse the submarine. At this stage, we received word that our game will not be able to be multiplayer, but I was satisfied with the level as it still was of a small-enough size that only rebalancing the variables could be turned into a single-player game.
Conclusion
This was my first project working with other disciplines (Visual Art and Programming), and a great learning experience that let me use my design knowledge on a small, manageable project. We started with a small team of three while brainstorming, which helped greatly with keeping the vision throughout the project, and onboarding new teammates to the concept.
I learned how difficult it is to do level design and how important it is to establish the vision of a level, this being my first real level design experience.
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