Snowflake


 

Snowflake is a personal project and game taking inspiration from other games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and the late P.T.

The player wakes up in a cabin, but something isn't right...Snowflake has logic puzzles and riddles that are akin to Silent Hill in difficulty. Beware, you may need to find clues in the environment! This small experience merges some Holiday charm with some chilling atmosphere.

My goals with this project were to learn and better understand the inner workers of the player controller and creating interactive puzzles. Looking back I did many things wrong in this project and I learned a lot from it.

Tools Used

Unreal Engine 4, Photoshop, Audacity, Evernote, Excel

 

What did I Do?

I was a Game Designer (solo project)

  • Built the entirety of the project in 1 month (design, map, narrative, audio, and scripting)

  • Worked within a modular kit to build the play-space

  • Created custom textures and altered textures for puzzle props

  • Setup lighting with mood and atmosphere in mind

  • Recorded, mixed, and implemented all audio including the cool radio!

  • Wrote all narrative text, scripts, and setup voice actors for their parts

  • Added dynamic depth of field using off tick ray traces to determine and lerp to the new depth blur

  • Implemented Sound based detection using ray traces to identify surface (wood, stone, carpet) and then run through an array of sounds to create a more natural sounding walk

  • Explored less constrained design in the puzzles with the hope it would lead to entertaining interactions with said puzzles

 

What DID I LEARN?

  • Organic and open form puzzles make for a difficult experience if the player is not used to said puzzle types

  • More obvious breadcrumbs baked into the UI but as diegetic as possible

  • Make sure sounds meant to grab the players attention are loud enough and repeatable in-case they may have not heard them

  • There is never enough play-testing

  • Raise the ambient light a little to dispel pure black areas (even in scary games) unless a very key section is meant to be super dark (no need for the whole space to be in complete darkness)

  • I needed to learn UMG, and made it a point in projects after this one (UMG are the UI tools within Unreal Engine 4)