Key to Freedom
DESCRIPTION
Escape with other survivors of a house of death, control by a millionaire psychopath for entertainment.
ROLE
Level Design + Lighting + Narrative Design
GENERAL INFORMATION
Action-adventure 2022 PC Blockout Console
TOOLS
Unreal Engine 5 Powerpoint Discord
THE PROJECT
Key to Freedom is part of a personal end-of-year student project.
The goal of this project was to evaluate the students' skills in the vast majority of the areas of game design studied at the school.
But in addition to this global body, we had to deepen one of the specializations that we had chosen in the second year.
For me, it was Level Design with an approach of Narrative Design and some Level Art.
MECHANICS
The game is oriented as a multi-cooperative game, a marriage between an escape-game and the Saw® movies. There are no real game mechanics as such, except for the interactions, the textual exchanges that stimulate the social or the use of items for the simple purpose of survival.
In summary, the game mechanics are :
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Interacting with elements of the scenery
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Interact with other players
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Running
CONSTRAINTS AND SOLUTIONS
The first constraint was : how to think and facilitate the interaction between players?
For that, we should have explored several tracks like the UI, a proximity chat to force players to group together to better communicate or propose a ping system between players to better designate points of interest.
The main intention behind this addition is to make communication as accessible as possible without overloading players with information that would ruin the already simple gameplay.
The second constraint would concern the replayability of the game.
As an escape game, it is complicated to propose a totally different experience to the same theme of session.
But this replayability would be increased by applying a random factor in the puzzles as well as in the exit doors.
For the puzzles: there would be more puzzles planned than present in the game, proposing different pathern according to the games.
For the Level Design: the position of the rooms would be fixed, but their content would be procedural. There are more exit doors than planned exit. But only one is unlockable.
