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)