The Tsar’s Secret is a 2.5D stealth game about infiltrating the Tsar’s palace. You can’t fight back, so the only way for succeeding is to outsmart your enemies and remain undiscovered. Use magic powers to blind or cause deafness in the palace guards, sneaking behind them and complete your mission.

Play as Grigori, an occultist spy from Mitrovia who has an important mission: to infiltrate the palace, find the classified documents and, most importantly, get out without being seen or heard.

The mission is not an easy one, but he has a special ability: altering the senses, changing how the world is perceived. His magic powers will allow you to blind or cause deafness to your enemies, but be wise, your own perception will also change.

DEMO downloadable on Steam!

Since the beginning of the project, I have been involved as a Game Designer in every stage of the process, collaborating within a team of around 40 people.

My role as Game Designer included different tasks:

• Concept Design: Main mechanic and Core Loop

• System Design: Define, balancing and prototyping mechanics with blueprints

• Level Design: Create stealh puzzles

• Narrative Design: Create plot and internal monologues

• Quality Assurance and Playtesting

More detailed in following sections

I would highlight that due to the number of people and departments involved, good communication skills were required to keep people motivated, believe in the same idea and maintain a positive work environment to achieve the common goal in the estimated time.

The project was developed in Unreal Engine 4, working with Perforce for version control and Hack n'Plan for task management between departments.

After the main mechanic were defined, the design team started to perform the first internal tests. The requirements for each of the mechanics were technically defined. For example, how long does it take to switch between modes, what happens if an enemy catches you when switching, what is the range of enemy vision, what is the range of enemy hearing, or how much noise do the player's footsteps make? Thus began the phase of balancing these mechanics until the desired result was achieved.

Once the main mechanic were closed we started to introduce new mechanics and abilities for the player such as: hidden walls, checkpoints, doors and noise generators (clocks, chimneys, music box, etc.) and other discarded ideas such as traps or new enemies.

Each of these mechanics were defined with a design document that included: description, fixed and configurable parameters, playable situations. After the definition, prototyping was carried out with blueprints in Unreal and validated or not by the design team.

During the level design phase the design team started to generate different puzzles and game situations. The design process included the original concept (on paper or ppt) which was then prototyped in Unreal and tested in-game.

Among the numerous rooms generated, they were evaluated in terms of difficulty and fun in the different playtesting with players and the rest of the team members to select the best ones and include them in the final content.

I include some examples of different rooms using discarded mechanics as traps or interactive elements to solve the puzzle.

I was in charge of the narrative of the game, for this it was decided to make small interventions at the beginning and end of each level to give an idea of the plot of the game. To do this we started from the idea of using cards or diaries that would give context to the plot, allowing the player to know the goal of the protagonist and not be too invasive with the player who prefers to omit this content.

At the beginning of the game, the first card would appear giving the player a mission and throughout the levels the player would find new cards hidden in a music box. A design description was provided to the art team of what the final result should look like, included below also with an example of the internal monologues of the protagonist that helps player to understand the plot.

During the development stages of the project I was directly involved with the programming team to review all the changes and improvements they introduced to the game and confirm that the defined design requirements were met.

We considered that we should make the sound mode (Tenebris) easier and the sight mode (Silentium) more difficult since we thought that the player would not switch to sound mode due to the absence of sight. However, in the first playtesting we observed how the players advanced room by room using almost exclusively the sound mode. This made us rethink certain puzzles and try to force the player to switch modes in certain situations.

In collaboration with Voxel School we prepared several session to test the game with the public.

In the following video you can see me performing a playtesting with real players!