Overview - Part of Me
“Part of Me” is a narrative driven stealth horror game where you play as a burglar with the intent to steal valuable art from a well renowned artist. The game play out a story that is developing the further you venture in the house to eventually uncover dark and horrible secrets.
This was our 4th Game Project at Futuregames. I worked as a System and Gameplay Designer. Additionally I provided with the core narrative theme as well as assisted with the narrative beats.
Pre-Production
My contribution for the narrative and the project started already in a previous course where my task was to write a Narrative Design Document based on a game idea of my own choice. I wanted to create a narrative where the story was being told by the player using their curiosity of knowing more and explore the level to unfold the story the deeper they decide to go. The game idea also heavily emphasizes on the enemy’s background, motivation as well as how it behaves.
After we were presented the theme of “Conflict Within” and to focus on A.I. I felt that this game idea was worth mentioning to our group. After some further brainstorming and voting we landing in working based on my previous work. You can read the document below.
Narrative Design Course Leader
Narrative Design
The premise of the game is that on the surface it acts like a burglar simulator where the player enters a house owned by a renowned artist. The player is guided to collect valuable items from the building and bring it back to the van. As the player finally finds and collects the first big valued art piece, which resembles a golden foot, the game shifts and the AI spawns into the game world, which turns the game into a stealthy horror game as the AI will chase down the player if they notice them.
We wanted our progression to trigger when we had delivered key art pieces to our drop off point. We also wanted that the key art pieces would gradually indicate that The Artist is using human body parts for their art. This is being indicated by that each new art piece picked up becomes a bit more grotesque.
I suggested “The rule of three” to keep each travel less stressed and for sake of the scope to not have to fill in content between 2 extra back and forth traversal. As well as to enforce the player to spend more time sneaking around the house avoiding the enemy rather than having shorter paths to multiple key art pieces.
In collaboration with our narrative writer we landed in following the theme of the iconic philosophical trio “The Three Wise Monkeys” to create the key art pieces for the narrative progression. I mocked up an example of how to use our art assets to create fitting art pieces. The overall writing was then tweaked to fit this theme.
First version example of “Hear no Evil”
Final versions of “Hear no Evil”, “Speak no Evil” & “See no Evil”.
Environmental Storytelling
Play with sound
Something that I was interested in was creating a shock factor in the narrative when you’ve ventured far enough into the story. The reveal is that the person that you’ve been stealing from, and especially some of the art pieces you’ve already collected, is actually made from human body parts. I wanted the player to have a space to explore the grotesque art pieces and give them time to process their interpretation on what is going on. With no artists in the team and limited funding for art assets it was a bit challenging. But I tried to be creative with what we got and tried to combine different assets to create what could be an insane artists work.
System and Gameplay Design
Since one of our focus for this project was on the A.I. I decided to quickly put a flowchart of the A.I.s behavior. Focusing on different states and to ramp up the intensity and aggressiveness of the enemy based on the players performance in stealth. I provided our programmer with the start of a flowchart with the most necessary states and behavior. Our programmer in charge of the A.I. could later build the enemy with ease, and the rest of any further implemented behavior was discussed verbally.
AI Behavior
Rotation Code Puzzle
Created the function of a rotation puzzle that would unlock and open a door.
I later designed it in a simple way for the player to understand how far they would have to rotate the knobs for them to unlock the door. Not the prettiest, but it does the job.
The function for rotating the mesh when OnClickEvent happened on the mesh. Checking the code each time they have finished rotating.
Each mesh would have their own correct rotation value that would have to be correct simultaneously for the door to unlock
Keypad
Made a UI Widget resembling a keypad that unlocks the connected door when the correct code is given.
Through collaboration with other narrative designer we made the code be revealed through the progression and help guide the player through the messages on the phone.
Summary of My Contributions
- System Design
- Designed and built the stamina system using blueprints
- Designed and built breath holding system using blueprints that work in conjunction with the stamina system. (Update on this page at a later stage)
- Designed the enemy behavior using flowcharts
- Gameplay Design
- Designed the Gameplay flow together with other Narrative Designer
- Built and implemented rotation based puzzle
- Built and implemented a key pad
- Narrative Design
- Provided with Narrative Document to set the core narrative
- Adjusted the pacing the narrative to enhance gameplay flow
Reflection, challenges and mistakes
Increased trust in my team mates
During the project the narrative was often referred as “your (me) baby” by some of my team mates. Even if it was in a jokingly matter, I feel that they said that out of respect of that they want to honor the core of the work. I knew of the skill of our narrative designer and felt confident in letting go of “my baby” to him.
I was able to add in my thoughts of what I think could and should be done with the narrative, and he would listen and try out to work with it. Whenever I was questioning decisions that I didn’t understand he confidently could answer, explain and reassure his decisions. With this I feel that I could contribute and affect the narrative while not fully focus and work on it. Therefor I have a huge respect and gratitude towards Dominik Aleksandrowicz for his work.
P4V license and Github issues
In the middle of the project the schools P4V license ran out. Resulting in our team having to quickly adapt to put our project to Github. This eventually caused a lot of issues with many of my work ended up getting overwritten due to what I believe was incorrectly merging branches. I had to redo a lot of my work several times and I still to this day can find small bugs that I previously have fixed. I will therefor find some time at a later date to present my Holding Breath mechanic.
School work and life balance
Our Game Project 4 was schedule right before the Professional Development course which includes the big networking event The TING. Which put a lot of stress to work and polish on your portfolio in time to be able to show industry people. This ended up affecting me and my working capacity to a degree that I feel that I did not perform as good as I know I could have done.
I’ve learned I should’ve taken the time to setup my portfolio a lot more prior to the start of the game project so that I could focus fully on working with the project.