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A short horror puzzle game inspired by various horror media such as Train to Busan (horror film), Resident Evil (survival horror game), etc. A 6 person group project created for a Sheridan College Design Week Jam in a span of 5 days. Click the image above to play! Below is a short video about our game and our experiential intention.

Role

Artist, game designer, level designer, video creation, production co-lead

Tools Used

Unity, Photoshop, Premiere

Experiential Intentions

The theme for this Design Week challenge was to create a game that needed to be made with an experiential intention in mind. We were given a list of the Top 29 Things People Find Fun, and after some group discussion and brainstorming on Miro we decided to make a game that would showcase the experiential intention of 'Being Scared'. After picking a design intention, we then looked at human motives that relate to 'Being Scared' that would be present within the gameplay to help further our experience. From there, we brainstormed possible gameplay ideas and looked at various media for references and decided on creating a horror game that took heavy influence from the films Train to Busan and Murder on the Orient Express, as well as games like Corpse Party and Resident Evil. Ultimately, we ended up with the idea of a narrative and puzzle-heavy game that centered on the players being stuck on a train while they were being pursued. Below is our Miro board (click on each segment to see a zoom in).

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Finding an Aesthetic

After deciding on a game idea, the next step was for the team to branch off into our different roles and discuss our next tasks. Since I was part of the art team, we discussed possible art styles to do and decided on a pixel aesthetic for the gameplay and illustrated character sprites for dialogue. I created a mood board for everyone to look at which helped us all settle on a color palette, mood, and feel for our game. I was tasked with creating character sprites to help the narrative designer create a story, and to use within the game. I looked at various concept art from the game Silent Hill for inspiration, which lead me to create characters that seemed grounded in reality. These sprites greatly helped the narrative designer with story and character writing. The first image below was my initial grey scale of the NPC portraits, once approved I went on to colorizing them and created the portrait for the player as well.

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Level Design

The level design for the game was done by keeping in mind player progression and the stories behind each NPC. Since we wanted each level to focus on a certain NPC and each of them died in a particular way, I wanted to tie the level/puzzle design to the story of their death to keep on theme with the narrative. I started by brainstorming a few ideas of gameplay, and then further expanding upon it to help explain what the player would be doing and how to solve the puzzles. Below are the ideas I had for each NPC, which you can click to magnify.

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Challenges and Takeaways

Initially, we thought we would be able to complete the game bug-free and with no content cut out, however by the second day of work we encountered issues with our version control software and a whole day of progress was lost to trying to fix it. By the third day, we realized we had to reduce the scope of our game, cut out some characters, and scope down our puzzles/levels. In the end, we were all still able to complete our tasks, and while our game may be a bit buggy we still got great feedback from our peers and professors who said they enjoyed the story, atmosphere, and visuals of the game. The only downside to our scope reduction was that to most players the game did not come off as our experiential intention 'Being Scared', but rather 'Mystery'. Which the team was not entirely upset about, since 'Mystery' was the experiential intention we had in mind which would help our original.

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