Amenti
A single-player puzzle game
Project length: 8 weeks
What I Did:
Level Design
Animation Programming
Sound Design
Technologies:
Unreal Engine, C++, Blueprint Visual Scripting, Audacity
The Task
Our task was to make a game in eight weeks and present it. We wanted to create a single player puzzle game with an Egyptian aesthetic. Our scope focused on few abilities and few puzzles, in order to aim at quality over quantity.
My areas of responsibility were level design for the tutorial, animation programming and sound design.
Level Design
While I assisted in designing different aspects of the game, my main task was the tutorial. I wanted something very simple that would introduce one of the core mechanics of the game - grabbing fire.
I started by creating a core gameplay loop to encapsulate the essential experience of the game. This was to make sure that the tutorial covered all elements of the loop and that the player was introduced to the essential experience of the game in a very basic manner. We made a design decision to have a gradually increasing difficulty and complexity, thus the later levels would take what was previously introduced and add depth to those mechanics.
There is purposefully no UI text to aid the player, since I wanted to take advantage of a player’s curiosity and to avoid hand-holding. While it is a tutorial, it is also a puzzle. By not providing instructions in how to solve the puzzle, I am giving the player the gratification of solving it.
The player is guided by object placement, visual/auditory feedback and a familiar decorative setting that plant an idea in their mind. This idea eventually becomes the solution to the puzzle.
Additionally to the two torches in the room, a ray of light hits on a plate with an eye symbol next to a small pillar with a strange decorative piece on it. The eye is a clue in itself. It represents the player’s perspective, their “eyes”. If they place their cursor (or to “look”) at something specific, it will trigger something to help them solve the puzzle.
By standing on the plate, a looping sound effect is played to indicate that standing on the plate has some sort of importance compared to standing somewhere else in the room. If they had noticed the eye on the door before, they might notice that there is a golden yellow glow emanating from it. Looking at the glowing eye (i. e. placing the cursor at it) triggers the piece to move towards the door and connect with the frame to complete it. If the player lights up the torches and connects the frame they complete the tutorial.
With a small tutorial room, the effect of entering the hall of statues becomes a spatial crescendo and a reward for solving the tutorial puzzle.
Animation Programming
Character animation setup:
— State machines
— Transitions
— Blendspace with bone specific animations
— Camera followStatue and rat animation setup
My primary focus as a programmer was working on the animations. The game was to be played in so-called true first person, a POV perspective with the in-game view matched with the character model's eye location. I set up the state machine and all transitions in between animations. With Unreal’s Blend Space I got walking and running animations fluently transitioning between each other depending on the character’s movement speed and direction. In order to get the ability animations from the left arm to play simultaneously with the movement animations, I restricted them to only affect the specific bones coming from the arm and override the movement animations. Together with this I implemented all other animations in the game, such as the statues and rats.
Movement animations with soul in hand
Lower and upper body animation divide
Movement blend space in Unreal Engine
Control scheme
Sound Design
I created and implemented all sound effects. I wanted to create an otherworldly and eerie ambience which came into effect by using a lot of low pitched sub bass, reverb and attenuation.
The sound effects had a practical purpose to aid in player feedback as well as an enhancement of the aesthetic, like voices that whisper unintelligibly that refer to the souls of the dead talking from “the other side”.
The Result
The true first person perspective did not end up enhancing the player experience as much as we anticipated as the players did not seem to be especially excited by it. The experience would probably not have seen a big difference with a “normal” first person perspective.
The sound design was well integrated with the overall aesthetic of the game and complemented many key moments of the game, like whispering voices or doors slamming shut behind you.
Lessons learned
“While some amount of supernatural dealings are to be expected from the setting, I simply had no idea that I would be dealing with that kind of possible solution.”
The tutorial recieved mixed criticism. Most players figured out to put fire on the torches, but looking at the eye from the golden plate seemed to be quite hard to solve for many. This mechanic could have been too much “outside the box”, and due to the perspective it could be difficult to notice that the doorpiece was moving.
Should tutorials be difficult? There is a balance to maintain here in my opinion. On one side the player is free to explore in a safe environment. The other side is to provide a difficulty or an obstacle that culminates towards a eureka moment. Using the eye as a hint was in my view a cruical subtlety which did provide some struggle and ultimately satisfaction when solving the puzzle. However it seems that some players did not manage to solve this.
In retrospect I would have added more feedback, but still of a more suggestive nature. A marking on the empty part of the doorframe to indicate something was missing, or that the eye’s pupil would follow the player in order for them to draw attention to the symbol.