Game Download Link: https://morganellis.itch.io/lily

The vision for this game was to create a narrative horror experience in which the player controls a sheriff who is searching for a missing girl. The mansion which the game takes place in has 2 floors and a basement and the player needs to navigate the halls of the mansion, search for clues and items that might help them completing their task.

While playing, the player will find 3 unique puzzles around the mansion and each of them will reward one of three keys to the basement door which will be the last floor that the player can unlock.

In the early stages I decided what the design pillars are so we can refer to them whenever we want to add anything to the game. If the feature or mechanic we want to add doesn’t follow one of the design pillars we decide against it.

Survival: The player will have to use the tools in their hands to survive the constant threat in the mansion. 

Puzzles: There will be puzzles in the mansion that the player will have to solve so they can progress in the game. 

Ominous and Menacing: The player should always have the feeling that something is right around the corner or that they are being watched, always be on the edge of their seats. 

Weakness: The player should never feel like they are stronger than the enemies and should always feel that they are inferior. 

To make it easier for the team to understand what the player has to do to progress through the game, i created a simple gameplay loop flowchart:

The narrative of the game will be introduced to the player in the form of journal entries and newspaper clippings found around the mansion that were left by the residents of the mansion and their guests. Understanding the story of the game is completely optional to finish the game. However, finding the journal entries and the newspaper clippings will help the player understand more about what happened to the residents of the mansion and what caused all of it. It also serves as a reward for exploration for players who want to take their time and search every corner of the mansion.

We have 2 characters in the game, the sheriff who is controlled by the player and a dispatcher who will be watching what is happening with the sheriff through the live feed of the bodycam. Throughout the game, the 2 characters will be having conversations and discussing what they see and experience and trying to figure out what is happening in the mansion

Character

Our character; Nathan Cooper, is a 35-year-old sheriff in a rural town on the east side of the USA called Silver Lakes. He has 15 years of experience in the force and has faced all types of threats, apart from what he is about to face in the mansion. Despite the threat in front of him, he never gives up and will do anything to complete his job. Nathan was informed by a dispatcher of a missing 10-year-old girl who was last seen near a mansion that had been abandoned for decades. Nathan is tasked with exploring the mansion and its surroundings and looking for the little girl. All that Nathan has on him to face the threats is a pistol and a torch.

Camera

The camera perspective will be a body cam perspective instead of a first-person perspective, so the player will be looking at the world of the game as if they are watching a live feed of what the sheriff is doing and what he is facing. With that comes the fact that the arms of the character will not be below the view but rather will be coming from the sides of the camera.

Since the view will be from a camera and not the eyes of the player character, when the player gets close to items they will curve a little bit to simulate what would happen in real life, a fisheye lens effect. To add, The player will be using the movement of the mouse to look around, however, since we are using a body cam perspective it wouldn’t make sense if the player can look up or down since this is a body cam. Instead of fully looking up or down when moving the mouse up and down, the camera will move just a tiny bit. Lastly, since the game is from a bodycam perspective, we added a VHS tape effect to the camera to better signify that the player is seeing the world from a bodycam instead of the eyes of the player character.

Controls

• WASD → Movement
  • The basic movement speed will be walking speed and jogging speed. This is done to give the feeling of someone being cautious when approaching something that can be dangerous (the mansion).
• Camera Control → Using the Mouse
• LMB → Shoot the pistol
• RMB → Aim down the pistol
• L-Shift → Running
  • Running will not be infinite and the player will eventually be tired. After 10 seconds the character will start getting tired and after 13 seconds they will fully stop to regain their stamina.
• R → Reload the pistol
  • Whatever is still in the magazine will not be discarded but rather will get added on from the reserves. For example, the player had 7 out of 15 bullets left in the mag and 30 in the reserves, after reloading the player will have 15 in the mag and 23 in the reserves.
• F → Interact/Inspect
  • This will enable the player to interact with different items and add them to their inventory by pressing the LMB while they are inspecting an item or opening doors if they are facing any.
• Tab → Inventory/Codex
  • The inventory will include all of the items that the player wanted to carry with them in case they found a use for them. On the top of the screen, there will be another tab that will be called Codex which will have all of the pieces of lore and narrative that the player has found already while exploring the mansion. The player can switch to the Codex tab by pressing on it using the LMB and they can view a Codex entry by pressing on it using the LMB as well.
• L-Ctrl → Crouch
  • Crouching will allow the player to crawl under some items and hide under others.

Shadows: The shadows will be the more common enemy in the game and the player will be using the pistol to kill them. They will be patrolling preset paths and will chase the player if they see them, get shot at, or hear the player running in proximity.

Wraith: The wraith is an un-killable enemy in the game and the player will have to avoid it. however, if the wraith sees the player and starts chasing them, the player can shine their torch on the wraith which will slow it down and make it run away after 5 seconds and spawn in another place in the level.

• Shooting: The player will be able to shoot his pistol at the shadows. The player will have to be careful with the bullets they shoot as there isn’t a bullet item around the mansion that the player can pick up. Once the player runs out of bullets, they have no more bullets for the rest of the game.
• Torch: The player is equipped with a torch that can not only be used to light the environment but as a tool to scare away the wraith enemy.
• Running and Stamina: The player will be able to run in the game; however, they can’t and shouldn’t run whenever they can as the enemies might hear them and start hunting them, as well as that they have limited stamina and will get tired after running for a while. The player character will start gasping for air while running when they start getting tired. The indication of getting tired is done this way since we don’t want to have a stamina bar as it wouldn’t make sense for the stamina bar of the character to be visible on the body cam if we are going for as much immersion as possible.
• Enemy Whispers: As mentioned before the enemies in the game will be pure shadows, and the player will know that they are getting closer by having the screen will start getting darker and darker the closer the shadows get. The second thing that will happen is that the whispers and the voices that the shadow makes will become more intense and louder the closer they get, to the point that their voices will overpower all the other ambient sounds in the game. These 2 things will create more anxiety for the player and it will act as an indicator for them when they are in danger.

From the planning phase of the game, we knew that we wanted to have a ground floor, upper floor and a basement in the mansion. When designing the mansion I wanted it to encourage exploration and creating reasons for the player to keep going back and forth between the rooms instead of visiting each room once as the player is trying to find clues and narrative pieces that explain what happened in the mansion while trying to find the missing girl. To add, the plan was that the player should feel that the mansion is like a small maze where they could get lost for a little bit in the halls, however, it was important that the player shouldn’t feel completely lost to the point where they stop playing the game.

The mansion will have a ground floor which will include the rooms that are generally used by the owners of homes and the guests including a dining room, living room, ball room among others. On the other hand, the upper floor is meant to be used by the owners of the house only so it would have the bedrooms and possible work spaces for the adults of the house hold. The player’s only escape is to unlock the door to the basement in hopes of finding an exit there. The door requires 3 different keys that the player will have to find while playing the game, and each key is locked behind a puzzle that the player will have to solve.

Ground Floor

The first floor that i prototyped was the ground level with the following layout:

When testing this layout we found that it was easy to explore this version of the ground floor as it didn’t have many halls and different rooms, which defeated what i set up to create from the beginning of the design phase. This lead the the second version of the ground floor:

This version of the ground floor proved to be more of a maze than the first one with more rooms, and more curved halls instead of single simple hall that was in the first version of the floor. To add, while testing we found that the players wouldn’t just get lost in the mansion but also get confused on where to go because of the amount of options they have especially in the main hall as they can choose to go to the dining room, living room, or immediately to the upper floor using the stairs. This resulted in the third and final version of the ground level of the mansion:

The layout for the final version is the same for the second version, however some paths where blocked to make it easier for the player to explore. This included:

• The cigar lounge is locked and the player needs to find a key to unlock it. There is a clue that points the player towards the possible location of the key.
• The path to the upper floor is now blocked by cobwebs which require the player to find a lighter so they can burn it away and gain access to it.
• The path to the solarium is blocked by cobwebs as well.
• For the player to gain access to the upper floor from the library staircase, they need to find the key that unlocks the doors for the library which unlocks a door on the ground floor to create a shortcut and 2 doors to the upper floor inside the library.
• The player can find a map of the mansion in the solarium if they choose to explore it, however it is not necessary to do so in order to finish the game.
• The first of 3 keys to the basement can be found inside the study room which will require the player to solve a puzzle inside the library to gain access to. The puzzle has the player; after reading the clue in the library, look for 3 specific books in the library and interacting with them in the correct order to unlock the secret door to the study.

Upper Floor

The idea for the upper floor was that although it has the same dimensions of the ground floor, it would take less time to explore it and that is because of multiple reasons in which the most important of them that in the story of the game, the wraith and the shadows first spawned in the first upper floor which would make the floor impacted by the most because of their presence. This makes the residents of the house barricade most of the rooms in an attempt to trap the shadows inside those rooms and control their spread. The following is the map for the upper floor that was used in the game:

Both the Lab and the Secret Altar require the player to solve 2 different puzzles to gain access to them. For the lab, the player will find a padlock that needs the combination, and by reading a clue that is on the wall next to the padlock they will realise they need to enter the day and month that Lily (the daughter) passed away.

For the Secret altar, the player will need to solve a shadow puzzle where they will need to find the shape of the shadow of an object that has light shining through it to open the secret room.

Basement

As mentioned before, the basement was always meant to be a linear experience that is basically the end game where the player has only one path and what they need to do is clear and the big reveal for the story happens. The following image is the layout for the basement:

When the player reaches the Circle icon, they will find a steel door with the voice of a young girl crying coming from the inside. When the player interacts with the door, the crying stops and the player will start hearing the wraith behind them and with no way but forward and their torch battery, the player must keep running down the hallways of the basement trying to escape from the wraith. however, they reach a dead end and become another victim of the haunted mansion where no one ever survived.

Experience Diagram

To better visual the different paths the player can take and the location of key items in the game, i created an experience diagram that highlights the most important rooms in the mansion and how the player can reach them and where they can go from there. The following image is the experience diagram:

Grey boxing

To understand how the level will flow, and the scale of the assets in the game, I created a grey box of the mansion before we set out to create or find the assets we want to add to the game. The following video shows the grey box of the level during development and design, which is why there are missing doors at this point:

Here are some still images from the grey box of the main hall, living room, and library:

3rd Party Assets Used:

Since the team only consisted of a programmer and a designer. all of the assets used in teh project were found online and downloaded from different websites.