There is always one active object that you need to find. You can't see it, but you can hear it. If you listen carefully you can tell how close you are and if it is to your left or to your right. We tried to communicate if it is above or below you with all kinds of acoustic effects as well, but it didn't really work for most people so we got rid of it.
You are a little spark (top left corner) travelling through the darkness. If you get into the light of an enemy, it turns the light off and tries to hunt you down. At that point you can only hear how it's coming closer and do your best to escape.
The team composition worked out great. I learned a lot from those two smart persons next to me. They always gave me super honest feedback even if it hurt. I admire them for that.
This is how our ideation phase looked like. We used analog prototyping to explore and communicate our ideas.
After exploring a variety of different ideas we settled on this one. We loved the concept of using sound as a vital source of feedback and information for the player. (yellow = enemy in light mode, blue = enemy in sound mode, green = player)
An early sketch and a flow chart of the game.
We soon began to test our ideas in Unity to find out if they worked the way we imagined. For the most part they did. You feel pretty lost and helpless when you can't see anything around you and you are not allowed to walk into the light. This feeling is what we wanted.
Level design was one of the huge challenges in this project. In this attempt light could reach way to far through the level, there are no places to hide and dead ends like in the top left corner are just frustrating to deal with if you are being followed and can't see anything.
We sketched out a couple of different layouts for the level and discussed what we liked or disliked about them.
Our coaches advised us to play through the entire experience with analog prototyping material, which helped us to get a way better understanding of our game. Designing the level and coding enemy behaviors became way easier by doing this.
Here is the final draft of our level. Light can't reach very far, there are no dead ends, you won't get stuck and you will always be able to escape from enemies.
Another hard question was how we wanted to go about teaching the game. Luckily the concept isn't that complicated, so we just told the player what to do: "Find source of the sound!" The only thing you hear at that point is the gong sound of the object you need to collect. Enemies start spawning a little later on. They look evil and sound evil so most people know they need to avoid them.
Obviously we created the sounds ourselves and had great fun doing so. The sounds we managed to create are absolutely terrifying.
German expressionism, especially the film "Dr. Caligari" were a huge inspiration for the development of the art style. Our coach Susanne Brandhorst gave us this amazing tip. Good choice. Thank you, Susanne.
2016 we won the third place of the german "Multimediapreis mb21". It was totally awesome to be there. We met so many nice people. Thank you for inviting us!
I am really happy with what the team managed to accomplish.
