The Cell of Whispers

Game genre: First person horror, puzzle solving.
Gameplay summary: You wake up in a prison cell, you explore, solve puzzles, use interesting mechanics, speak to other characters, escape horrors you encounter, all to eventually uncover the narrative of what's really going on and why you're here.

Platform: Windows PC.​

Engine: Unity.

Time spent on project: Nov 2020 - Mar 2021 (4.5 months)

My job role(s): All. I developed this game solo.

Software used: Unity. MAYA. Photoshop. Audacity. Bolt.
 

The Cell of Whispers is one of my most polished game demos and one of my projects I'm most proud of.
It was also my first foray into creating a psychological horror game, which is one of my favourite genres, and I'd only made non horror / family friendly games etc before this, so I wanted to flex my skills in other types of game design and production so I'm not pigeon-holed as one type of designer, plus I just love horror / narrative games!

This was a solo student project for narrative design. Our task was to leverage storytelling through character, environment, backstory and gameplay to create a narrative experience in a slice of gameplay which represented what we would ideally make as a full game.

I learned a lot from creating this game demo, creating varied engaging gameplay keeping the player on their toes, adding replayability with collectables scattered around, weaved in a narrative to uncover if you pay attention to all the clues, built interesting interior and exterior levels, created interesting logic driven puzzles that aren't too hand holding, there's even a cute pet rat! it has it all 🐀😋 
It was all a very valuable learning experience. I may expand on this concept in future too.
 

My contributions to this project:

• Game design.
  - I designed the game flow, mechanics, art style, characters, story, everything, I was the sole designer.
  - The overall design was aiming for a deliberate retro playstation 1 style feel, semi low poly and pixel art style texturing etc.
   

• Art.
  - I created everything 3D you see, the interior prison modular kit (walls, doors etc), exterior island terrain including sculpting and layered texturing, the lighthouse, bridge, fences, the player arm and lantern, rat model, all the prop assets, particle FX, lighting, the water / ocean FX.
  - The only thing I didn't make was a few free tree models as I ran out of time and needed a stand-in.
  - The great macabre artwork on the cards & posters I wish I could take credit for but they weren't created by me, I borrowed their art, credit to the artist here
   

• Programming.
  - I programmed everything you see in game.
  - All except the first person controller. I used the free standard assets FPS controller, but I did modify the controller to do several things it didn't have by default, such as a camera zoom/focus mechanic, crouching. This would be the last time I use this standard assets controller, I made my own version for all future projects.
  - I programmed everything including:
  The puzzle and area flow, door interaction, dialogue system, "focus" interaction mechanic, the "flashback" scenes each with unique situations, collectable cards, weather fx, water/wave fx, & more.
   

• Audio.
  - All audio in game was sourced, modified or created by myself.

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Highlights from this project:
 

• My first horror game, which is a favourite game genre of mine.

• First time using terrain creation in Unity, sculpting, painting texture layers, painting prefab foliage etc 

• First significant narrative I designed and wrote. Weaving the story and clues into the environment and dialogue.

• First water/ocean I put in a game, I'm quite proud of how it came out, using scrolling normal maps etc.

• First "weather" I implemented into a project, using skybox coding tricks, particle FX, animated lightning etc

• First fire FX I put in a game, some particle FX and some emissive texture sheet animations.

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