Dawson's Ritual
You are a park ranger for the local state park. It is Halloween night and you are on duty to watch over the area. You should try to communicate with your daughter while the veil between the living and dead is thinnest.
October 2018 — Unity — PC
I created this game through the 2018 Darktober Game Jam, which had a time-constraint of a month. The theme of the jam was 'Ritual', and so, I had thought about the ritual of a mother who tries to communicate with her dead daughter every year on the night of Halloween. Initially, I did bring together a team of creatives who wanted to help make the game for the jam, but a lot of them flaked out, and so, I did do the majority of this project on my own (besides some custom sound FX).
Features
created mechanic of 'seeing ghosts' through phone camera
I knew I wanted to do something with parallel dimensions, summoning/communicating with another realm, and so ghosts and spirits came to mind pretty frequently. But, I didn't want the player to be able to see the ghosts all the time, only in specific circumstances. And so, I gave them a device that comes naturally to us all, our mobile phone. The player can see the ghosts by looking through the phone screen, but this reduces their field of vision. And so, there is some interplay between seeing whats around you in the real world, and seeing the spirits that surround you.
I successfully implemented this by placing a virtual camera where the camera of the phone would be, and rendering this to a texture that covered up the space of the phone's screen. Then, I culled the layer of the ghosts on the player's camera, so they couldn't see them normally, but the phone could. One difficult aspect of this was the performance of rendering everything twice, at a high enough resolution that it looked of realistic fidelity and believable, and having the player camera see the phone screen. Things like fire, smoke, water, ghost shaders, and their reflections, all made for a mechanic that was taxing on the game's framerate. I resolved this by cutting the player camera into thirds when holding the phone up (the middle third being the phone screen), and applying a blurred post processing affect to the player camera on the other two thirds that covered up the fact that I would limit the draw distance and texture quality of the player camera to save processing power. This worked fairly well, and made the game quite playable, while having a cool mechanic and smooth transition from the phone's resting position to it's 'screen space' holding position.
constructed and designed level, layout, environment, and lighting
In order for this to be an interesting and memorable Halloween experience, I wanted to place high importance on the level layout, environment, and flow, so that players could enjoy exploring and navigating the landscape. For the most part, the navigable terrain is flat, but I raised the terrain over the main house of the game, to note it as a landmark of significance. It is also well lit, since players naturally gravitate towards something that is high up and lighter than it's surroundings. Some areas were covered in thick brush, so that the player couldn't see where the path was leading them, unless they used their phone to light up the area. These were mostly used before frightening scenes in order to build up some tension and uncomfortability for the player, that they couldn't see where they were going. The main feature of the environment is a large lake separating you and the other side of the level. And so, the middle of the player's journey has them rowing a paddle boat across the ominous lake. Not only does this body of water give some contour and shape to the level, but it's evidence indicates to the player the foreshadowing of necessary traversal.