Month: June 2022

This is the third devlog of my third-term project, All Eye Shall Be Closed. It’s an autobiographical game, mainly talking about depression and my anxiety about being watched by others.

Human Model

First I have changed the low poly ghost model to a low poly human model. Compared with the ghost model, this one is a simple human body model with no facial features, which could be very helpful for later adding the eye features to make it looks strange.

The eye model is finally completely made. This model is inspired by N’Zoth in the World of Warcraft.

Events

The whole scene is mainly composed of two triggerable events, one is asking employees to help open the door in the school, and the other is picking up a drink in the store. There will be text reminders around the trigger, which are a direct message “press E” to remind the player that this is an interactive thing, and the other is textual psychological descriptions of the character’s request. When the event is triggered, the head of the character model near the scene will be replaced by an eyeball. At the same time, the mental description is replaced by the language of fear.

I deliberately did not write the mental activity statement in the first person. I put these statements into the game as a way for someone to tell the protagonist this information. The idea was inspired by my case study game this semester. In Hellblade, there will always be a voice that talks to the protagonist and guide her, but, in fact, this is just the illusion of herself. From a medical point of view, auditory hallucinations are also likely to be the mental language of mental patients. The patient’s mental activity is considered auditory hallucinations, due to some reason that patient thinks others are speaking to them. I hope to use this method to reflect the morbidity of the game’s protagonist.

Environment

First I change the skybox to a dark one and cancel the directional light. Now the scene starts to look kind of creepy. Also, with glowing texts, the scene wouldn’t be too dark to make players lose their way. At the same time, I add a rain particle system to make the scene more realistic.

Also, the event-related text has been added to the game, shown as followed.

There are post-image processes added to the scene, the globe volume including black vignette, bloom, and lens of distortion. The vignette could make the scene dark and make the field of view of the main camera more focused. The bloom help text brighter. The distortion makes the picture more distorted and morbid.

Also, there are two unsealed borders in the scene. I originally used some cluttered buildings to block the player’s movement, but I felt that too many buildings made the environment too monotonous, so I used the smoke made by the particle system as the boundary of the map.

Sound Effect

For the whole scene, I added the sound of rain. The rain sound will always play, and the playing sound and pitch are randomly selected between (0.7-1.1), which makes the whole sound effect more dynamic. At the same time, footsteps will occur when the character is walking on the road. When the event fires, a gradually louder sound of thunder is played.

More

I especially hide this in the scene. The first reason is to use the empty space. But the main reason is, while I do this project, I’m not sure about, what kind of message I want the game to convey. During playtests, the most common question I’ve been asked is, what do you want the players to know after playing this game. This game is designed as an autobiography game, and I think I put something that really makes me feel depressed into this game. But, this is not a game that tells people, I’m sad, or telling people to take care of the group of people who have the worse condition than me. I just want to show guys, I feel depressed and anxious sometimes. There is no meaning in this game.

All the eyes shall be closed.

Thanks.

This is the second devlog of my third-term project, All Eye Shall Be Closed. It’s an autobiographical game, mainly talking about depression and my anxiety about being watched by others.

Design

After the final decision of making this game in 3D, I followed decided the process of the whole game. In this game, there would be two main events, the first one is to leave the school, and the second is to buy some stuff in the market.

I just sometimes can’t remember to bring keys and cards with me. This caused a lot of problems for me. Every time I went to reception and talked to them that I ain’t bring my key, I feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t help thinking they might be mad at me and then hate me. Every time I would feel I bring a lot of trouble to them. This is the first idea of the events in the game. As an idea, the player wants to leave the school, but he finds he has no keys and then has to ask for the staff’s help to get out. Once the player asks for help, there would be some text showing up, showing how upset the staffs are. Then, the player would find everyone near starting looking at the character.

I’m afraid of crowds, and I think going to shop could be an example showing this. Because this is a thing that most everyone feels there is nothing to be worried about, it could be an idea showing I really have some problems when I do this. In-game, similarly, players could simply get into the market and buy something, then suddenly find everyone is watching.

Environment

I want the environment as real as possible. I think mixing a realistic environment with very abstract and strange elements that are unreal, could bring players a more interesting, curious, and uncomfortable experience. Because I live quite close to LCC, and there is a market located on the way I’m walking home from school, the game is set based on it and I’d like to follow the real location in my game.

However, there was too many useless building for this game, so I decided to only keep the position of LCC, Market, and my home, and deleted some building.

Model

At first, I import the ghost low poly from the unity store. The idea for the human model is, that I want it to keep simple and only focus on the facial features. At first, the white ghost on the right represents the initial state of the people in the game. Once players trigger the event, they would transform into the black ghost with glowing red eyes. At last, players would find a mirror, see in the mirror and realize that I’m the weirdest one, a ghost in between two states.

Playtest

I only have limited feedback, because at this time the project has just started. During the playtest section, I mainly talk to them about what is going to be done in the future and ask for advice, showing them the first-person perspective movement and the environment.

Regarding the model, someone mentioned that this model is too cute. They thought a more realistic mannequin could be used with exaggerated head features. For example, David’s proposal is that the head can be a camera. This suggestion is very useful because I also think that the current model does not fit the theme of the game, and the head features are not obvious enough.

About the environment, people are discussing the light and building’s location with me. First, the scene is too bright for this depression theme. I’m considering disabling the directional light, making the text glowing, and adding some area or point light to make the scene looks darker and depressed.

Also, as I have already deleted some roads and buildings before, people still think there are too many useless places. For example, the player would take a 1-minute walk from the school to the market. They suggest either continuing to delete to make the distance closer or adding something interesting along the way, like interactive stuff, etc.

This is the first devlog of my third-term project, All Eye Shall Be Closed. It’s an autobiographical game, mainly talking about depression and my anxiety about being watched by others.

First Prototype

At first, the prototype was designed as a 2D platform game as players control a character walking around, and with every step players take, the wall would close a little bit to reduce the players’ movement area, and eyes would appear on the wall and keep looking at the character. So, the idea is to bring oppression and helplessness to the players.

Then, continue doing this, I was thinking about making it a 3D game with a larger place and adding some interactive elements. Then I’d like to focus more on the eyes because I personally think eye contact is very important in daily communication. Still, I sometimes am afraid to have eye contact with other people, and I don’t like the feeling of some people keeping looking at me at the same time. So, I want to enhance that feeling, and hopefully bring that to the players.

I talked about this idea with a group of people, including some classmates, David and Maddy. David and Maddy quite like the idea of eyes would follow people as players move. However, they also point out that, making it a 3D game could take a lot of time, and advised me to think about it more because now the first prototype works, and only need to focus on adding some interactive stuff.

I’m thinking about this for a long time, however, I finally decide to make it 3D. Not because 3D looks cool, the reason is, as making an autobiographical game, I want to show everyone what happens to me in the real world. 2D could be too abstract, I can not make the event resonate with players without amazing ideas, which currently I can’t think of any. If making a 3D game, I could easily imagine some scenes like going to a shop and feeling like being watched, then I could easily transform this into a 3D world and then add more stuff.

inspiration

So, as I’m afraid of eyes, I’m also kind of obsessed with eyes. And I always focus on the eyes in games, movies,s or artwork. This makes me have a lot of sources that could be the inspiration for my game.

Also, there is a game called “When the darkness comes”. It’s a walking simulator whose glitchy and dark tale tries to illustrate the hardships of depression and anxiety through a variety of imaginary digital landscapes. I’m really into this game, and I like the art style of it.