December 2024
As the final project for my first semester as a graduate student at USC, I was tasked with creating a small game project with three peers, focused on narrative play. Immediately, our team gravitated towards body horror aesthetics and a unique puzzle mechanic inspired by games we loved. As the producer, I led team meetings and managed our JIRA page, keeping our scope narrow using the skills I learned as a producer for my capstone in undergrad.
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Puzzle Area
3D First-Person Harvesting Area
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As the writer, I knew I had a difficult task at hand: portraying a narrative that was about the unconscious mind, a complex introspective topic. For this reason, I carefully crafted our three-act structure such that the information player's obtained was vague, yet thought-provoking. This sort of story was not the kind where every little detail mattered—all that was important is that players were receiving enough information to form their own story of what was going on.
As the lead designer, I was excited to create puzzle gameplay that was innovative and exemplary of our game's core themes of body horror and exploring the unconscious mind. Inspired by "Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice," players are tasked with making sense of seemingly random horrific objects in a puzzle cube to form a specified shape (called the "unconscious core"). Combined with another mechanic introduced in future levels, which involves rotating the camera perspective around the cube-like space (a la "Fez" or "Moncage"), we were able to create puzzle gameplay that excited and engaged players.
Make sense of the objects that appear in these nightmares, using them to form the shape of the unconscious core.
Rotate the camera perspective to wrap your head around these mutilated realms.
Thanks to my prior experience as a producer, our team had the opportunity to playtest extensively, even using one-way QA testing rooms! Our team consolidated our data into a short playtest report, which you can read below:
Playtest Report (1)
Playtest Report (2)
Tools I Used
Aseprite: used to create some art assets, including the cover art and in-game cursor
JIRA: used to manage production
Unity 6: developed in engine
MuseScore 3: used to compose background music