Paraphernalia

A school project where the goal was to create a storytelling experience without explicit narration or excessive use of words. As well as an element of Player Expression.
I personally went for a more experimental approach based off indie games I’ve enjoyed, such as Gone Home and Unpacking, crossing over with elements of Japanese Literature that I have been consuming often at that point of time.
1 Month - Design Research, Pitch and Presentation
2 Months - Production
— Level Design —
- Conceptualisation
- Greyboxing
— Blueprints —
- Items
  - Picking up
  - Inspecting
- Flashing Lights
- Level Triggers
- Cutscenes
- Camera Mechanic
  - Taking and saving of Photos
  - Camera Roll to view Photos
— Audio —
- Dynamic Footsteps with Metasounds
- Procedural Looping ambience with Metasounds
- Other Audio SFX and Trigger

Research Document

Pitching

POSTER

After the pitch, we were required to hang our recruitment posters around the class as everyone in the class would decide what project they want to work on.
This was my poster! It was photo-bashed with AI art and open-source images, do I don’t claim any credit to actually making them - just putting them together!

Pre-production

brainstorming and Gathering references

After new members had joined the group, we held a brainstorming sessions just to re-explore the game concept and see what ideas everyone had to make it a better experience.

Mostly, we talked about spaces and what kind of house and the time period we wanted the story to take place in. Eventually, we still decided on a cottage area as free assets for those were more readily available.

Level Design Process

For the level, we tried a different approach to blocking out the level. Instead of directly creating the level in Unreal Engine, we decided to use The Sims 4 as a level prototyping tool.

This allowed us to prototype quickly and also experiment with different furniture types to achieve the feel that gloomy yet somewhat rustic feel we were looking for.

(click on images!)

Production

Final Game Design

Unfortunately, due to the short duration of the project, many features had to be cut. Here’s what the final design reflected:

Here’s a final trailer video of the game:

Blueprints

Here’s some blueprints stuff I did.

Object Tracker
UV Offset Material
Camera Mechanic
Camera Roll
Player Blueprint from Scratch
- Movement
- All other relevant controls

Audio

The sound effects for the game were done with Unreal 5’s Metasounds.

Footstep SFX

Using Metasounds, I was able to randomise a pitch offset everytime the footstep SFX was trigger. I also had a pool of different footsteps sounds. Combined, these made the footstep SFX less of an earworm for the player.

Additionally, there is also a small chance for it to play a floorboard creaking sound, using the same principles as above.

Looping Ambience

By firing an event within the Metasound, I was able to make the background ambience loop between a pool of tracks every time the current one was done.

*all sounds taken from freesound.org with CC0 licenses.

Reflections

This project was a good lesson in learning more about cutting features and scoping the project appropriately. The final product was far from what was initially pitched, but it was still a good effort overall!

Despite being an experimental concept, it still needed to posses some sort of gameplay and interactions for it to be an engaging interactive experience - which is what games are all about. Hence, the “hidden objects” kind of gameplay.

Still, it was an interesting foray into an experimental space, which explored the possibilities of games as a storytelling medium via non-explicit means. And for 8 weeks of production time, I think this is still a project I can be proud of.

Summary

Duration

Roles and Responsibilities