Haunted Havoc - Third Person Survival Horror
Group Project Size of Team: 8
Role
Game/Level Designer
Project Length
Release Month
10 weeks
November 2023
Platform
All systems
Description
Fiends are all around and all you have is a sword and a loaded pistol with limited ammo. You learn that inside the mansion every door has a cost of coins and the only way to leave the mansion is to kill enemies to collect coins so you can gain new weapons, more ammo, and items to escape before it's too late!
Introduction
This game was a class project to mod an existing game and our group decided to work in Fortnite Creative to create a third person version of COD Zombies.
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What we use:
We used Fortnite assets and UEFN to complete our scope
Project Details
What I did:
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Created the floorplan of our 3 floor mansion
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Chose secret rooms in the mansion for fun side missions while playing
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Made decisions on doors, weapons, and item costs
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Added assets to make the mansion "spooky"
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Chosen weapons to increase rarity through each floor
Project Summary
As we got into the project, we really wanted to focus more on the gameplay rather than the visuals. We wanted the players to focus on killing enemies to collect coins so they can open more doors to obtain more weapons and fun items!
Design Process
Being on a quarter system can be rough especially for us game design students. It means we have to scale down our scopes and fit our game within 10 weeks of classes. When thinking of game ideas for our project, we collectively agreed that Fortnite Creative would be a great use to mod an existing game. During our time of thinking, the word "escape" wouldn't leave my mind. I realized that we should have escaping to be one of our main mechanics in our game. Then it all came to us. We should create a survival game where players have limited resources to escape a haunted mansion (since our project would go through Halloween). We then thought about how we can make this happen. Since Fortnite have fiends in the game that can drop coins, we instantly knew that this would be a goal for our players. We more and more realized that we were recreating COD Zombies with a fun twist.
Pre-Production
I was in charge of the level design (and some gameplay design) for our game. I immediately went and look at how some of the COD Zombies maps were aligned with a balance mixed of gameplay and level design. I looked a lot at the map: Groesten Haus. It's one of the smallest maps ever created but it was made most effective for our game because of things like room space, decor, weapon choices, and more.
2D Design
I set my focus towards helping the design team with the layout of every floor. We wanted to mirror what some modern mansions look like to make our game a little more realistic. We included rooms like the study, a garden, the library, and more. We wanted to make sure there are a plethora of different rooms around the mansion with their own special touch.
Flowchart Goals
I worked on a quick flowchart to demonstrate our goals for the players as they're progressing through the game. The player starts in the third floor bedroom where there are two doors; one that's open with no cost and one that cost 50 coins. From there it goes:
Layout
With the floor plan laid out, it was time to start blocking out. The first thing I did was blocking out how tall each floor should be and the room sizes. Once I was done, I went back to check the flow of the levels by walking through each room determining if it needed to increase in size or decrease.
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Throughout the blockout, I was thinking so much about where the doors were and if some rooms were too close together causing the gameplay to be a little clunky. I went back and made changes to some rooms with the amount of doors they have. Once the blockout was done, it was time to help the artists with adding assets and decorating the mansion.
Weapon/Item Placement
After decoration, I went in to decide weapons and their placements through the mansion. Throughout the game, we wanted players to feel a sense of progression not just through the doors but through the weapons as well. We utilize the rarity system to our advantage for the game. I was tasked with choosing weapons for the second and first floor as well as all the secret rooms inside the mansion. In the secret rooms, I decided to make them no less than Epic weapons because we want players to find these rooms to obtain powerful weapons to make their gameplay more fun. Inside of these rooms are pumpkin launchers, sawblade launchers, kinetic boomerangs, and a sideways minigun. With these weapons, players feel a sense of success by completing mini tasks in their journey of escaping. Plus it makes killing so much more for our players. I purposefully put the rooms in plain sight but not too easy for players.
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I also was tasked with ammo placement as well. Because players have limited ammo, we had to make sure there are pickups for ammo (still with a cost!) so they don't have to resort to their sword.
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Red signifies shotgun ammo
Purple signifies light ammo
Final Results
Challenges and Iterations
Challenge #1: Being behind on Sprint deadlines
Our team found ourselves behind on the sprints due to lack of communication from other teammates in our group. At times I felt I was the only one passionate about creating and finishing this game. It seem like the only time the group wanted to put effort in was during class which is only 3 hours a week.
Solution: I established myself as the lead designer for the game to help encourage my teammates to take more time to work on our game outside of class. Once giving them more guidance and helping with their parts, we were able to complete our game
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Challenge #2: Fiends spawning through walls
We had spawners in our mansion that let enemies spawn through walls which wasn't a bad thing until enemies got stuck in the wall.
Solution: The spawn radius of some spawners were inside of the walls so we move it to let the fiends spawn within rooms and not through walls
Final Thoughts
This game was extremely fun to make. This is the first largest team I ever work with and as well as the first time I truly got to focused on level designing. If you would like to play this yourself, look up "Haunted Havoc" in Fortnite. Stay tuned!