Unseen (WiP)
A First-Person investigation game about tracking invisible creatures.
- Rubika Final Year
- Team of 9 people (5 artists, 2 designers, 2 programmers)
- Concept Creator, Game & Narrative Designer
- Unreal Engine 5
- Team of 9 people (5 artists, 2 designers, 2 programmers)
- Concept Creator, Game & Narrative Designer
- Unreal Engine 5
Game Pitch
You are a cryptozoologist, who's called on a remote island near Scotland. Here, a medieval order used to worship invisible creatures called the Unseen. As you explore, you remark strange things happening, and your camera catches an unknown figure. Can you track the Unseen and solve the island's mysteries?
For my final school project, I had the chance to bring my own concept to life with a team of artists and programmers!
Creative Vision
Concept Creation The basis of Unseen was to make a game where the key challenge would be observation, with the idea of invisible beings revealing themselves when you point your camera towards them.
Evolving the Vision Once the concept was selected, I gathered a team to help define the vision further and later bring it to life. Many iterations were made at this point, and I had the role of constantly communicating on the pillars and the changes we made.
The artists, programmers and my fellow designer had plenty of ideas to bring to the table, and I tried my best to ensure we had the same vision of the desired experience.
Communication A lot of this, as well as every other aspect of my work, requires keeping the team updated and the discussion open. I do this through tight documentation & frequent presentations.
Narrative Design
Narrative Delivery I designed all the ways the narration was going to be handled and delivered to the player, mainly via Environmental Storytelling.
Story Building We designed the story around the theme of the protection of nature and the preservation of species. At the end of the day, the mythical 'Unseen' is but an endangered animal.
Testing with Ink As Unseen is a pretty difficult game to build, with a lot of moving pieces, I first tested the narration, puzzles and mysteries using Ink, my favorite tool for branching narrative. It also turned out a great way to put ourselves in the mind of the player when experiencing the story!
Our Official Art Test
Game Design
Bringing the experience to life As Unseen is an experience-driven concept, we naturally adopted a top-down approach to design, and had to design the mechanics accordingly: "What tools can the player use? How can they interact with the Unseen? What are the challenges required to uncover this secret?" are a few of the dozens of questions we had to answer.
Knowledge-based Puzzle Design Unseen is a knowledge-based game which asks the player to be observant to find the clues of its riddles. The biggest challenge was knowing which clue to give them, and how to hide them accordingly, both in terms of level design and narrative delivery. The deductions had to be intuitive once you gathered all the clues, but more challenging if you only found some. I worked closely with Yoann Pierkot, our Level Designer, on this matter.
Handling Playtest As of January, our prototype is currently being playtested. After making the playtest protocol, one of my tasks is to compile all the playtest data and then process them with the team.
