As a fan of spy and heist movies, I always enjoyed the trope of one person giving information to the person executing the mission. For this project, I wanted to design a Co-op puzzle game that has two players collaborate and communicate with each other to complete puzzles and perform heists. But with every good spy movie, there’s always a twist. In “The Trace”, two players are trying to rob museums and banks by solving puzzle modules and escape with their bagged artifacts. But some of those artifacts have the chance to be haunted, and will plague the characters throughout their playthrough, affecting each player differently based on whether they are the “Intel” or the “Agent”.

In the game, the two players can choose to either be: The Intel, sitting in an RV in charge of reading through manuals, catalogues, and blueprints; or The Agent, physically in the building following the steps provided by the Intel, disarming traps and avoiding capture. Each time the players load into a map, the game will randomly generate a layout and fill it with artifacts to steal and random puzzle modules for the players to solve, all within a given time limit. Each player must deal with their own challenges while helping each other such as hiding from roaming security guards, police checking the RV, or rival treasure hunters trying to find you. Additional threats to the characters come in the form of different entities, the type of entity being decided once the player steals a specific type of artifact. These new threats will take on different shapes and present different challenges to the player by creating new enemies, changing the environment, or generating new requirements the players need to stay aware of to stay alive.

My Goal

Whenever I start a project, I set goals and skills for me to achieve and learn in order to become better. For this project, I wanted to learn how to implement random generation in environment and objects, I wanted to incorporate VR, and I wanted to learn more about incorporating Cooperative play. These are each a particular challenge as they will challenge my technical skills in Unreal Engine Blueprinting, and force me to create designs and layouts that I’m not as familiar with.

In many cooperative games or puzzle games, its really fun to play through the first time but can quickly become repetitive. This is something I wanted to work around by implementing random generation to make each map and experience as unique as possible, even down to the types of threats the players come across. This allows for players to be able to play for far more time without much repetition, and will still offer challenges as they continue to play. While I designed the random generation of level and puzzle “modules” and have them building off each other or in the correct spaces (as seen in the photo above). My current difficulty is creating more control over the generation to limit certain parameters while it is building.

VR is always something I’ve been interested in and I love the immersive feeling it brings to video games. It requires similar methods of design to base levels and games around, but also requires new considerations such as movement, more complex interactivity, and a deeper understanding of atmosphere. This allows for the opportunity to learn a new set of skills as well as a new perspective to view level design from.

WYRD

Part of many good psychological horrors is the doubt of what is real and what is being imagined. In this project, “WYRD”, I take inspiration from “Alice in Wonderland” and Celtic Myths of the Fae realm, making use of the bizarre and twisted nature of an “otherworldly” realm. In WYRD, a ex-detective follows a series of clues involving their lost sister, leading them to an old manor in the outskirts of an old city. As they explore the woods leading up to the building, the player disturbs a rock circle, creating a series of events that lead to them falling down a tunnel of dirt and rock, eventually coming across the old manor. While there, strange events and scenes in the house put the character’s sanity into question, in an attempt to ascertain what memories they retain are truth, and what memories have been warped by the creatures that dwell there.

The project would make use of an “iteration” playstyle, where the player travels through the same location multiple times, with new changes occurring throughout each iteration. These changes could be new threats and enemies, new locations being unlocked, scenery changes, or even experiencing different perspectives of previous events. Each iteration concurrently happening after falling down a tunnel, therefore delving deeper down “the rabbit hole”. My vision is to implement a “memory” system, where the player must discover falsehoods in their memories in a puzzle-esque style, while also figuring out which memories to relinquish to the Fae creatures in order to save the character’s sister. As certain memories change or are lost, the story branches into different directions and create different experiences for the player as they explore the manor grounds.

My Goal

My ultimate goal for this project is to create an intriguing story that allows can branch off in different directions, creating new events or dialogue directly relating to the player’s choices. Focusing less on the technical aspects of the engine and putting more time into not only the asset art and models, but also the art of level design. I need to create a world that is able to direct the player around in a fluid, diegetic manner, while also giving them information about the world through environmental storytelling. Similarly, I want to create a puzzle mechanic that is relatively simple to create, but still engages the player in a narrative and unique way, creating another avenue of story engagement by having the player recall certain aspects of information they’ve heard previously and comparing it to the memory they see at that moment.

I wanted to subvert the common horror tropes of jump scares and loud noises by being more subtle, creating situations or cutscenes where the “danger” is in the background, partially hidden, and never fully in frame. This would create situations where player might question whether they saw something or not, but still instill that skin-crawling feeling that something is very wrong. This led to ideas like hiding something in the rear view mirror of a car, seeing someone briefly grabbing your arm in the reflection of a window, seeing someone watching you from a window but then fading away before you can look again. The difficulty with implementing this effectively is to balance how hidden or how obvious it is. If its too subtle, most players would likely miss it and it would lose the impact. However, if it were too obvious and “in your face”, the idea would fall into the category of common tropes I’m trying to avoid. The other thing to keep in mind is the frequency of these events, too many will overpopulate the horror and start to normalize it, but if they’re too spread out then the tension in the player dissipates before the next big event. To take these into acccount, I planned out several key events and locations within the Manor for testing, with the plan to gauge how much tension each event creates, and spread them out evenly before each key scare.