This week was a little slow as I got back into the project following last week’s kerfuffle. After a long conversation with the rest of my team, I believe we’re mostly over the communication boundary and can move forward with the project. With this in mind, I’m optimistic that we’re not majorly behind our schedule for producing a minimum viable product in time for the playtest. While we wouldn’t have any 3D assets prepared, I anticipated this all the way back when drafting the timeline in the presentation.

I started creating the main menu UI in Unreal Engine. The logo was something I made in Affinity that I decided to use as the title image. Affinity is an Illustrator/Photoshop competitor and has a similar suite of tools. I achieved the effect painlessly by applying special effects to some text (just like in Photoshop) and created the butterfly using a vector layer.

Unreal Engine has a very convenient set of tools to create UI, outlined in a tutorial I followed to create this main menu. All of it is done through GUI, and within half an hour I had it set up, at least visually. Buttons, texts and images can be easily inserted and blueprints can be easily attached to those elements to give them a function. 

As I said earlier, I’m also interested in SFX work. I’ve used the DAW Reaper in the past, but I’ve begun experimenting with it to edit samples. For now, I just added in one sound effect in Unreal for the UI. But for the playtest I’d like to do something more ambitious. I’ve been paying attention to the use of audio in video games when I play them as they deliver such a huge effect to the atmosphere. Many of the games I play are survival and based outside with a lot of natural ambience. Adding a hint of that despite how artificial the environment is could hint at the surreal nature of the setting. Echo or a reverb effect would also add a lot of depth

I went about recreating the concept art that I had created before the previous playtest. This time I did it in a document format with all of the annotations in text to be a lot more readable.

Kamilla made a really great reference document that helped me with this design work. It contained 100 mb worth of images and blueprints.

I decided to go with creating 1.5 levels. There would be one full level that allowed the player to explore and solve puzzles freely, which would lead into the “second” level, a single, fixed perspective which would contain the final puzzle to allow the player to beat the game. The first level would be in a contemporary, modern pool style, based off of the Transvaal building in Moscow that was wedge shaped with a curved roof. Then this would give way to the older, basilica-inspired environment of the final level. It would give a sense of progression, that the player had made their way into a deeper part of the girl’s psyche and was about to overcome her anxieties and fears. I felt like this was really important to convey as it complimented the story and even a small detail would interest the player and draw them into the dream world.

Below are some images from Kamilla’s reference documented.

I even sculpted this idea out in clay first. It really helped communicating the sense of perspective i was going for and it was quite fun. The player would traverse the outer perimeter and arrive back where they started to progress.

I ended up incorporating the platforming elements as Jeremy seemed to be keen on them. It also helped account for our lack of complex puzzling mechanics.

Below are axonometrics that further elaborate the spatial view of my level design as well as a perspective drawing of what level 1.5 needed to look like.

This was level 1.5, my idea for the puzzle would be a tile sliding game that would unlock the VHS tape and end the game- adhering to the game pillars of using older technology to progress and unlock the endings. The tape represents memories and fears the main character processes throughout their dream.