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.