Level Designer and Art Director
A first-person escape room puzzler where you play as an unsuspecting playtester trapped in a haunted house. Explore and solve puzzles with your ghostly companion as you unravel the mystery of the obsessive and crafty Game Master and escape the house.
Unreal
10-person team - designers, programmers, and sound designer
Fall 2023 - Spring 2024
Finished, unreleased
The Game
Design Pillars:
Crafty
Handmade puzzles, unconventional solutions
Paranormal
Ghosts, hauntings, the spirit world
Partnership
Work with the ghost to succeed
Unpuzzled Business was a student team project made during my Junior year at DigiPen Institute of Technology. The team Haunted Minds was formed out of two smaller teams due to the structure and team size limitations of the course, so the game that became Unpuzzled Business started out as a mishmash of several different core ideas. Despite this, we were able to pull together a cohesive and fun final product.
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One major limitation to the project was our lack of artists. We chose Unreal partially for the fact that Epic Games curates a huge marketplace of user-made assets, many of which are free and some of which even come from Epic projects directly.
In particular, we based the game’s art style heavily on that of What Remains of Edith Finch, as the entirety of that game’s environmental assets were available for free. It was a challenge building a visually interesting game with very specific kinds of prop-based puzzles entirely from marketplace assets, but by choosing a mostly realistic style we were able to design our puzzles around the available assets fairly well.
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Due to the mix of programmers and designers both wanting to learn Unreal, we decided to primarily use blueprints. This allowed us to work together more smoothly on the same components, and in particular allowed our team’s designers to take a much more hands on approach to working on the game.
However, due to many of us being inexperienced with Unreal and/or the blueprints themselves many of the early development time was spent watching tutorials and seeking out technical help from upperclassmen. Still, this extra work at the start of the project set us up much better for the rest of the year.
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The decision to design the game as an escape room game as opposed to a more general puzzle game was an important one, as it set the tone for a lot of the puzzles and the look and feel of the house environment itself. One of our major design pillars was to make the puzzles and the player actions feel “crafty”, drawing from the hand-made props and puzzle items found in real life escape rooms.
However, as the game draws on the environment and puzzles become much more supernatural as the true nature of the Game Master becomes more clear. This allowed us to make rooms that felt visually unique without sacrificing the feel of natural progression as we blended inspirations from the real to the unreal.
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From the beginning of the project, our wonderful sound designer and the rest of the team agreed that we wanted the game to have voice acting for the Game Master character. Unforeseen problems toward the end of the year kept us from accomplishing this, but we still spend a good amount of time and effort working towards this goal. Because of this, we were able to learn a lot about the process of voicing a game and all the challenges that come from it.
My Role
Responsibilities:
Grayboxed the house environment using sublevels and Unreal’s geometry brush
Decorated most of the rooms of the house and arranged puzzles
Designed several puzzles and themed escape rooms
Selected nearly all the premade art assets in the game and created all UI art
Wrote much of the game’s documentation including playtest reports and design documents
I worked as Unpuzzled Business’s Art Director as well as a level designer. My main responsibilities were to guide the game’s aesthetic and art style with available premade assets and create a sense of place with the house’s shape and layout.
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I had a somewhat strange role on the team for this project, as both a designer and the game’s Art Director. Despite not being an artist, the course required every team to designate an Art Director and I felt most confident in my ability to take on the responsibility. This meant that I was responsible for making sure the game felt visually consistent and captured our intended tone and style.
I kept track of any relevant asset packs from the Unreal asset marketplace and decorated much of the game myself, although other designers took responsibility for several of the rooms. I also created custom UI assets in Photoshop, although the game was very light on UI in general.
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As a level designer I focused mostly on the overall layout of the house, while the team’s other level designer focused more on the puzzle design, I built the level from grayboxing onward and adjusted it as necessary, eventually redoing much of the original map in Unreal’s geometry brush tool set.
I also learned how to make use of Unreal’s sublevels to divide the house into smaller rooms so that multiple people could work on levels at the same time. It was a lot of up front work to set these up, but it paid off in the end by speeding up our level design process a lot.
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Outside of the game development itself, I handled much of the game’s documentation such as game design documents, progress reports for instructors, and playtest reports for the first half of the year. I also edited or rewrote much of the game’s dialogue towards the end of development for clarity and grammar, although I didn’t do as much in-game writing as I would have liked.
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Premade Assets
As a team without artists, we had to make due with what we had available to us. Much of the game's visual aesthetic came from free assets taken from What Remains of Edith Finch, as they were available on the Unreal asset marketplace and provided almost everything we needed for a house environment.
We did our best to put our own spin on the game, and as the Art Director of the team I spent a lot of my work time choosing and modifying assets to make the game look more supernatural. We did a lot of work with lighting throughout the house to set the mood, and made use of particle effects to represent the supernatural.
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User Research
As a puzzle game, there was a much greater need for externally playtesting our game than many other projects I've worked on. We had to walka fine line between difficult and simple puzzles, which took a lot of fine tuning with things like visual guidance and prop placement.
Despite this, one of the biggest issues with our game was that we didn't playtest enough. We were working on puzzle changes and guidance until the end, which meant much of the later game didn't receive as much testing as was necessary and the game ended up harder than we had hoped.
Through playtesting we were also able to find some significant performance issues on certain computers that was not noticeable on the ones we had been using to develop the game, causing one of our programmers to spend weeks profiling and fixing the game's dynamic lighting.
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Sublevels and Geometry
About half way through development our team was running into issues editing the level itself, as multiple designers were implementing different puzzles at the same time an Unreal did not allow us to merge changes. Through some research, I decided to break the main level into individual rooms by using Unreal's sublevel tools.
This meant that the playable level itself was actually a collection of smaller levels, each containing a single room and placed to invisibly connect to the others around it. It took a lot of work to make this change late into development, but the amount of time it saved us after that point made it well worth it.
I also rebuilt the rooms with Unreal's geometry brush tool, allowing me much greater control and faster editing of the level's geometry. Sadly, our game's collision system for placing items only worked with meshes and we needed to take extra steps to convert the geometry brushes, requiring me to write a guide for other team members who might need to change a room.
