GradEX Winner 2024: 1st place - Game Masters - Design
Unreal Look is a first-person quick adventure where you can see the protagonist's reactions. As the player will gradually move around the level, the character they are controlling will react differently depending on the context.
The level I've used for my game was made with the intent of maximising the player engagement at every step.
Every room has something new to interact with; thanks to this, the player will constantly be rewarded as they keep exploring (Similarly to the design of a museum). The final result was the sum of several iterations and feedback from playtesters.
One of the things I loved about this project, was that it allowed me to express my creativity in a very peculiar way. My character will act as it is present in the world, thus if he sees a flower, he might want to smell it. I just hope he is not allergic to pollen!
The special connection that can be created between the player and the protagonist is one of the highlights of this game. Basic actions like blowing a candle, have been defined by the testers as something 'intimate'. This idea could be expanded one day to more complex games! What if our protagonist is sad, or needs to kiss someone they love?
Much care has been put into the basic action of moving the first-person camera on screen. Usually, most of the first-person games, do not give feedback related to the basic movement of the camera. With this, the basic feeling of looking up-down or left-right was a main aspect of the development that I did not want to ignore.
The same philosophy of the feeling of looking around was also applied to the most basic action of jumping. One of the main aspects of the development I've learned during my master was related to giving satisfaction to the player in basically everything. Having a full 3 stages animation for the jump, fall, and landing was tricky, hard, but not impossible. And the feedback received from the testers was exactly what I was aiming for.
As for every animation, my objective was to give the correct feedback to the player as consistently as possible. Being hit by something was the same. With lots of recordings and blueprint magic, I made a set of dynamic animations that adapts to the directionality of the hit. Was it from behind? From the left side? From an angle of 256°? A unique blended animation will be used for that!
This small game takes inspiration from those games that used to feature a 'Status bar face' such as Wolfenstein or Doom. The Layout of this game will feature a first-person camera with also a UI window that will constantly show the character.
In March 2023, Epic Games revealed this very interesting update to their metahuman called 'Animator'. For a game designer like me, this update was so interesting that it forced me to eventually switch from Android to IOS. That's because this animator required the depth sensor that you can find only in the newest iPhones. This project was my first attempt to learn this technology, and after this, I'm looking at the future with even more curiosity. This tool, allows designers like me to have countless (if not infinite) facial animations with an overall impressive quality if we think that they were recorded by a damn phone.
Similarly to Pilots - Tiga Winner, also in this game, I had to act, and for the first time in my development history, I was using my face! I have always been a huge fan of these types of technologies. Learning how to use these new development tools was interesting, hard, but also funny!
Check out other game/level design projects I've made: