„I’m not fond of making new memories … but if I do, I’ll make sure to treasure them.“
Polaroid is a stealth survival-horror prototype made by me and a friend for our bachelorthesis. In it you control your player in a dimly lit environment, equipped with only a flashlight and a cameroid that take pictures which move in real-time. The goal is to find a way out of the facility, uncover the mysteries of this place and most importantly, make it out alive…
The entire Game is made for free and just for testing purposes, with the intent of learning the Unreal Engine 4 and the pipeline of creating games.
My Contributions:
In Polaroid you play as the renowned Detective Alec Palmer, who mysteriously found a Cameroid that once you take pictures with it, they move in real-time. You later realize that you weren’t the only owner of this Camera, and soon discover that the places you end up don’t seem to be as friendly as they might seem to be…
For this Project, the main outline for this Prototype was to follow-up on my Thesis that was defined before development began. The focus topic (translated from German) is:
„Fear – How it’s caused by Video Games and how Players react to it“
The mainline Goal of this Prototype is to showcase certain Elements that can cause fearful reactions to players. By using Unreal Engine as a baseline, we measured players in separate Build Versions (AB-Testing) to play the Prototype, in which afterwards, they were asked to fill out their survey about the experience. The scope of it was narrowed down to two people (as this was a group project) and assigned with their proper expertise.
I was in charge of the following Areas:
You can check out the full GDD (German only) here.
With the start of developing the Project, I defined Design principles to adjust the workload accordingly:
For the Development of a Tutorial, I designed the first Room to be a „temporary“ safe place for inexperienced player to test the level mechanics. Although it’s not implied, the ambience of the room should incentivize to keep moving, as if they are pressured and don’t have enough time. This is visually & audibly supported (visually with the absence of light & ticking noise of the godfather clock)
Naturally, Player Behavior is usually drawn to actions that stand out from the initial scan they do in the room. Typically the drawers next to the Lamp or the glowing red Light-switch are hints to learn about new Level Mechanics.
Player Direction
Another example is the Game Kit Feature that „Horror-Engine“ provided called „Automatic Player Direction“. With this, I can edit the parameters to make the player character look at a certain object. Although not all interactable objects can be immediately noticed by the player, I’ve added a custom transition to guide the player on how to find & interact with doors.
Polaroid utilizes many built-in features from the Unreal Engine, namely using Auto-Exposure Effect. When you are not looking at a light source, the view of the player gradually darkens, making it almost impossible to navigate through the level. This is to encourage players to stay near Light sources, effectively using the first room as a space to get familiar with the level mechanics.
This is to encourage players to stay near Light sources, effectively using the first room as a space to get familiar with the first level mechanic.
A unique gimmick to Polaroid is it’s Realtime Camera System using the Polaroid Camera. The player can take pictures at a certain angle (Pressing Q) and can use the Notebook (Pressing E) to review them. Any motion captured in realtime will be displayed within the area of those pictures. However, the player can only store a limited amount of pictures before the first one get overwritten.
Once the player has progressed through half of the Level, an Enemy AI called „Boogeyman“ will attempt to roam around and try to kill the player. I generated a Navmesh Layout for it’s pathing and edited the boundaries of certain areas as „off-limits“ (using Box Colliders). The AI uses a basic sense System that if the player is within viewing distance, it will attempt to chase after the player until the line of sight breaks.
An additional feature is it’s ability to turn off light’s and open/close doors. This is done by using Box Triggers that upon collision will turn off the lights, etc.
Due to the limited amount of time writing the Thesis, we limited the amount of playtests based of its basic functionality (Sanitycheck). I developed a GYM_Map / Toybox Map to verify the Mechanics of the Prototype. Custom built mechanics like the Camera System and AI-Behavior where the main topics of Testing, and were conducted by my Team.
Survey Feedback (AB-Testing)
After the Prototype was developed, some attributes within the game where changed in order to narrow down in which areas cause more discomforting/fearful emotions:
All participants during the time where told to carefully observe what happens in the Prototype. Afterwards, they were tasked to write down their player experience in an online survey.
You can find the link to the survey here
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