Game idea

This week after some more meetings and discussions, we settled on our game idea. Below is the synopsis we wrote up of our games story.

Brought to a small Swedish village under false pretences, the player must survive the night trapped in a house with a ghost determined to take your soul . Fight back by hiding, running and surviving however you can until sunrise . I hope that your fear does not overwhelm you as control of your sanity will be the key to success in this game.

It will be a fully 3D world in first person set in a large cabin and will involve having to find clues and resources to solve the mystery of the town, all while avoiding the ghost in the house and the demon dog keeping you trapped inside. You will have a sanity meter that will increase when the ghost is near and you must find pills to keep it down. If you are caught by the ghost, or your insanity meter goes too high, you are transported to a graveyard where you must avoid the demon hound and make it back into the cabin. If caught by the demon hound in the graveyard, its game over.

After we managed to figure out exactly what the game is, we divided ourselves up into set roles. We needed:

programmer lead scripters
art lead
2D Artists
3D Artists
Animators
UI Artists
level Design lead
Level Designer (design and look)
Technical Level designer (programming and mechanics in level)
narrative Lead
story writer / narrative designer

Everyone seemed to know pretty quickly what they wanted to do so we were able to assign our roles fast. I chose to be one of the 3D artists as that is where I feel my skills are and I really enjoy making 3D assets.

Then we got to work on figuring out the art style of the game. We knew it was going to be a horror game but we didn’t want to go for a normal realistic look so we decided to go for a Tim Burton style look. Meaning we wanted to distort the objects and look of everything. We also wanted it to have a low poly look, not just for the art style but because we didn’t want the game to struggle to run on a normal computer. Finally we decided on using realistic textures with a low colour gradient for our look as we felt the art style would seem non realistic enough already and would give the game a bit more of a darker horror feel. Below are some of the reference images we found during our research for the art style.