Silent Maze
Project Summary
Silent Maze.mp4You wake up in an unknown facility. And a hunting killer is constantly searching for you. The only thing you have is a flashlight. Navigate through this maze-like facility and find a way out.
Game Engine: Unreal Engine 4.
Project duration: 3 days.
I was the sole level designer and scripter for this project. I scripted door mechanics, player controller, flashlight mechanics, enemy AI, and other level mechanics.
Project Development
The issue I had and what I learned
The game was inspired by Silent Hill. There are two different dimensions; each has a different aesthetic. The surface world is relatively clean; the inner world is dirty and rusty. The layouts of the two dimensions are slightly different. Some locked doors in the surface world are unlocked in the inner world.
Players cannot fight back. They have to avoid the enemy. Additionally, players can hide in the locker. However, the enemy will check the locker if he sees you entering one.
Entering a locker
During my development, I wasn't very good at behavior trees yet. In order to achieve a similar result, I created a boolean called "can open locker". The enemy can only open the locker when the boolean is true. The boolean is only true when the enemy is pursuing the player. If the enemy loses sight of the player, he will randomly move to a position near where he last sees the player.
There was an issue with this approach. If the player's last seen position was near a locker, it was possible that the AI could accidentally find the player hidden inside a locker even if he didn't see the player entering a locker.
The game world is very dark. To see in the dark, players need to use their flashlights. Flashlight runs on a battery; the battery recharges over time. Since no gameplay was built around the flashlight mechanic, having a battery mechanic felt redundant. One thing I could do was make the player more visible when the flashlight was on (increase the enemy's view distance when it was on).
Navigating in the dark was tricky. To prevent the player from getting lost, I created a map with marks of all important locations. Greens are vents, reds are locked doors, and blues are entrances to the other world.
Inner world map
Surface world map
Teleport between two worlds
Having a map wasn't enough. Players could still get lost because they had no idea where they were on the map. I intended to show the player's avatar on the map, but I didn't have time to develop this UI feature.