Eldritch Themed Fishing Game
This was a prototype where you're a hunter wielding a spear gun hunting the eldrich horror-themed creatures of the deep in an underwater cave.
Roles: Technical / Systems Designer
Studio: Away From Home Studios
Development Time: 2 Weeks
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Contribution:
Over the 2 weeks of development, my role was to design the mechanics and systems.
Inspiration:
For design ideas I looked for inspiration from games like theHunter: Call Of The Wild, Subnautica, and Titan Souls.
When looking at 'theHunter: Call Of The Wild ', the player can't afford to be careless. When hunting a dangerous animal the player has to make every shot count and being careless about their approach can lead to being attacked by the very animal they are hunting. This pressure of the hunt is a game-feel I wanted to achieve in this prototype.
'Subnautica' presents a master class in open-ocean horror. Cramped spaces and dark caverns not only present a challenging hunting ground but also present places to hide. Horror can also be drawn from panic and confusion, implementing a roll mechanic allows a player more freedom of movement when accessing tighter spaces, but when a player becomes careless, they may find themselves disorientated.
'Titan Souls' forces a player to make every shot count by giving the player only 1 arrow. In this prototype, the player is only given only one shot for the spear gun. Each monster has a weak point which upon being hit will kill them, but if a player is careless with their only shot and doesn't hit a weak point then the player is left defenceless as they wind the spear back in.
Reflection:
Still being new to unreal 5, any time in engine was spent understanding the modeling tools in practise scenes. Most of my time was spent outside of engine with drawing up design documents and communicating with the programmers about what was within scope. Even though our production time was only 2 weeks, I felt we had successfully achieved at creating a game-feel which was representative of a what the full game could feel like.
My biggest frustration was not understanding the modeling tools well enough at the time of production to help with the level design, but it's only a minor complaint as I am proud of my systems design work. As of now my familiarity with Unreal 5's modeling tools is good enough that I can comfortably sit in as level designer again.
Feel free to try the build for yourself!