It typically is not advised to show old, not-so-polished work however, this still happens to be a project that retained a substantial amount of ownership and am still proud of to this day. Coincidentally, I had just been immersed in psychological horror content ranging from Fatal Frame 2, Call of Cthulhu, to rediscovering filmmaker David Lynch, the timing could not have been better to jump onboard. The ideas for the story and gameplay manifested intrinsically and were supported by the dev team.
Despite the linear aspect of the map, my challenge was to provide an open world illusion, but in essence gently guide the player to their destination. Create a problem and then encourage the player to solve it with the aid of conflict and narrative, This in turn lays the basics of cause and effect design. That said, the gameflow of a single player survival horror title is driven by the subtle pacing that allows the environment’s atmosphere to subconsciously creep up on the player. This especially would highlight or accent our vision of using the shadows and low lit areas as extensions of gameplay. A plethora of constant scares numbs the senses therefore, planning out down time between NPC encounters allows the player’s thoughts to nurture themselves into the intended mood.
Asylum Top Down - Map
Security Room Hallway
Security Room
Stairwell Opening
Straight Jacket NPC
Materializing Church
Church Window Entrance
Broken Covenant - Level Walkthrough:
Development Team:
Design: Chris Molina- Asylum design layout, content development, additonal art support and sound design.
Technical Artist: Hieu Tran- Editor/PS3 troubleshooter and animation.
Affects Artist: Tamar Zeithlian- Emitters and additional design support.
Environment Artist: Edward Soehendra- Static meshes and textures.
Design, textures, assets, lighting and animations are purely unique content created by the development team. All in game characters and concept art provided by Climax Group.
Technical Facts:
The team was essentially designers and artists not PS3 programmers therefore, certain events and functions of the initial design could not be implemented without crashing the game. These included user interface, artificial intelligence, shaders, and dynamic lighting. We built the demo based on our prior knowledge of Unreal 2 technology and with aid form Epic’s support page.
To optimize memory usage, Unreal 3 allowed construction of the map with textures as opposed to BSP or Brush methods, which are common among most editors.
The level was first blocked out in the editor.
All Static meshes were created using Maya 6.5.
All audio dialogue was recorded using the development teams voices (including myself) which I later tweaked in Logic Pro audio and implemented into the Unreal audio editor.
The demo was abandoned due to significant changes within the infrastructure of Climax. Click for Gamasutra article
