ROLE:  Designer

Platform:  PC, Oculus Rift |  Engine:  Unreal 4 |  Duration:  14 weeks |  Team:  8

Blackwood is a horror game designed for the PC utilizing the Oculus Rift.  Players find themselves ghost hunting on a rural estate when the entities haunting the property become violent.

My Contributions

Level Design

• House layout and clutter for:
  • Gift Shop
  • Dining Room
  • Living Room
  • The Void
  • The Final Room
• Jumpscare pacing and sequences
• Jumpscare and interactivity blueprints
• Audio design and implementation
• Lighting
• Landscape design from NASA heightmap data

System Design

• Calibrated player and camera movement speed and height to better match real life motion and reduce potential for player motion sickness
• Designed Wendigo jumpscare sequence

Writing

• In-game notes and posters
• Background history of the property
• Related websites

Production

• Pitched original game design
• Assembled development team
• Maintained weekly task calendar and established milestones
• Gave status update presentations for potential investors
• Coordinated playtesting for design feedback

Youtube Let's Plays

Note: contains NSFW language.

Level Design

The game takes place in the Blackwood estate, a massive home once left to rot in the wilderness before being converted into a tourist trap.

The house was inspired by an old farmhouse near my father’s neighborhood.  In order to quickly prototype the geometry of the house, I located architectural farmhouse blueprints and utilized our modular kit to rough out the walls, floor, and ceiling.  The majority of the house layout stayed the same from this prototype, with further additions of the gift shop, an exterior area, and the final room by myself, and the addition of the long hallway and reworked geometry of the backroom workshop by another designer.

I did all exterior work.  The landscape was generated with NASA height map data from the Boston Mountains and smoothed out around the house.

The Gift Shop

Players begin in the Gift Shop, a small room with kitschy merchandise meant to both establish the feel of the house and let players become accustomed to the controls and the Oculus Rift.

This room was originally created to address two major concerns.  Firstly, I wanted an easy, non-tutorial-screen way to expose players to the major mechanics.  Additionally, after playtesting, I noticed even seasoned gamers needed a moment to adjust to the interface the Oculus provided, thus the small, “safe” room with lots of things to look at to give players a chance to adjust to the headset.

In addition to basic room geometry, I also populated the room with the furniture, clutter, and lighting, and planned out interactables.

Two of the most important interactions I wanted to expose players to early were the interact buttons and the stare mechanic. 

We made this game compatible with both keyboard and gamepad, the latter to make it easier on Oculus players, thus the “click or LT” scrawled on the TEST ME sign above.  Clicking or pressing left trigger near the sign causes the front deer toy’s head to bobble, accompanied with a little spring noise.

The note on the table to the left also has a very visible “READ THIS” on the lower right corner.  Notes are picked up by centering the field of vision (denoted by the center ring of the flashlight) on the note, so any player attempting to read it for more than a couple of seconds will have the note come close to their face.

There are also early hints at the story in this room.  A blown-up newspaper article on the purchase and history of the property is framed on the wall, along with a poster that discusses the legend of the female figure that haunts the house.  The green sign under the register counter advertises the property’s services.

There is also a lone wolf bobble head sitting on the windowsill, apparently gazing outside, and the body of a deer bobble head in the window’s corner, its head ripped off and flung behind a book cabinet.  This is meant to hint at the relationship between the ghost girl and the Wendigo.

Scripting

Utilizing a special version of our programmer’s interactable door, I set up the bobble head and note to “unlock” the door after both had been interacted with, accompanied by the scraping sound of a chair falling over from behind the door.

I scripted a light switch blueprint class that could turn off and on every light in the room attached to it, which was used in following rooms.  The attached lights were also an exposed variable, allowing for easy light attachment to the switches, in addition to allowing lights to start on and giving them a noticeable flicker when turned on.

I also edited and implemented audio for the bobble head, the note pick up/drop, light switch on/off, lightbulbs coming on, locked and unlocked door handles, and the door creak.  Audio relating to notes, lights, and doors were re-used for all other instances in the game where these scripts occur.

There is a small script that controls a jiggling handle sound effect for the front door when interacted with, denoting a locked door, which changes to a more frantic sound after the player encounters their first ghost in the next room.

I wrote a small Easter Egg for the taxidermy bear: although it does not have the Fresnel that denotes an interactable, if the nose is clicked, a honking sound plays.  This, of course, is accompanied with a cross stitch “No touching” sign on the wall.

Art Asset CreatioN

• Changed carpet material and added wear and stains in Photoshop
• Created signage for map, postcard, and bobble head stands
• Created bobble head sign stand from primitives
• Wrote Services, Newspaper Article, and Witch signage copy; created Newspaper and Witch signage in Photoshop
• Edited and converted map and postcard assets for engine use in Photoshop

The Dining Room

The dining room, just beyond the Gift Shop, is the first haunted location the player visits.  This room sets the new tone for the rest of the house: lighting is significantly poorer, shadows and large windows inject paranoia, and much barer furnishings make the rest of the house feel abandoned.

Lighting was a challenge in this game.  The Oculus automatically ups brightness in order to reduce motion blur, so we needed to find a compromise that wasn’t too dark for PC or too bright for Oculus.  Hotspots for interactivity from here forward were given properties for their materials in order to stand out in the darkness.  Emissive materials were applied to objects like notes, and very light colors were applied to objects like the laptop, radio, and rug in order to strike contrast with the dark furniture and room geometry.

I populated this room with its furnishings and clutter, and handled its lighting.

Players first enter this room facing a laptop, already on and waiting.  It will go through a series of loading screens as it boots up a Kinect-based ghost hunting program, inspired by real equipment in the ghost hunting community.  After examining the laptop, players begin to explore the room.  The first interaction most have is with the note on the leftmost table from the door they entered through.

The laptop’s Kinect “ghost finding” program runs independently from the player’s exploration-initiated jumpscares.  Here I set up a series of materials and videos to play the program booting up and capturing a stick-and-ball model of an entity.

The “screen capture” effect was accomplished by placing a camera slightly above the Kinect, tinting the camera’s feed green, and taking a screenshot.  I then passed this on to an animator to use as a background for the ghost’s Kinect model animations.  I received these as several different videos, which I set up as media materials and wrote a blueprint that handled the screen transitions.

We noticed during playtesting that some players never saw much of the laptop screen.  In order to encourage their curiosity, I added a beeping sound effect to the loading screens and whenever a figure was “caught” with the Kinect.

I also gave this room an Easter Egg if players return after venturing deep into the house—the chairs rearrange themselves into a poltergeist-esque formation on the dining room table.  Since players can trigger a door to lock in the living room, not everyone gets to see this event, but it was a nice detail for anyone doing extra exploring.

Scripting

I wrote the script handling the laptop’s displayed screens and videos, as described above.

In addition, the light switch in this room also controls the radio—if players want the perceived security of a little extra light in the room, they must also deal with the creepy static emitting from the old radio.

For the ghost girl’s scream in the doorway, I created the audio asset and implemented the notify in her animation blueprint.

The script for the poltergeist chairs is a simple collider set on the other side of the house that changes the location and rotation of the chairs.

Art Asset Creation

• Copy and material for Welcome and Kinect notes done in Photoshop
• Emissive material for phone background

The Living Room

Here, tension takes a dramatic step up as ghosts become more confrontational.  I created the basic geometry of the hall, living room, and back hall areas, in addition to clutter population and first pass lighting.

I used lighting and emissive materials frequently in this level to help direct player pathing.  The first purpose of this was to draw player attention during the ghost girl sequence, and the second was to lead players to toy pieces they needed to collect.

I explicitly placed the television so that when players open the living room door, they immediately see the figure of the ghost girl illuminated by the TV static.  This generates a wonderful moment of tension as players decide how to move forward.

Though players may approach her however they wished and her behavior is the same, I encouraged the more direct path shown right with much more light, both via the TV and exterior sources, giving players a tenser moment as they creep up behind her.  Turning around, most players were lured towards the grandfather clock I had set up with an emissive material face, directly towards the girl’s jumpscare.

I placed the toy collectable pieces through this area, choosing illuminated places or similarly significant pieces of furniture to place them near.  The grandfather clock and lamp at the center of the room provided necessary light to draw players, and the TV was often inspected after the ghost girl disappears.  The first of these pieces appears on a side table in a cramped room—players usually leave the door open and scan the room right-to-left, coming last to a note in the leftmost corner that activates the pieces.  Doubling back, they would move left-to-right, immediately finding the first toy piece.

Scripting

For this segment I set up randomized audio cues to give some variance to the Wendigo’s approach cues.  This gave three different variants in the kind of static he would play, and alternated between footsteps and a laugh before the static.  I implemented these cues into the blueprint a programmer set up to manage the Wendigo’s behavior.  I also created the Wendigo’s jumpscare scream and implemented it into his animation blueprint.

The appearance of the paintings in the back hallway was a joint effort between myself and another designer.  The most time consuming aspect of my part was finding the paintings; I wanted them to be thematically consistent, so all were oil paintings that dealt with cannibalism, starvation, harsh winters, and similar subjects.  I attached the painting meshes to an array blueprint made by the other designer, made some minor arrangement adjustments to cover as much of the walls as possible, and realigned the collision boxes triggering their visibility when my testing had shown it was possible to see them pop into existence if facing a particular direction.

Depending on how the player initiates the sequence of events in this area, the girl can disappear from the TV and not be seen again.  In order to give a better tapering off to her presence, I edited and implemented audio of a girl weeping and set it to play from an upstairs hallway only in the aforementioned scenario.

With playtesting, we noticed players would get stuck with the last toy piece, which was dropped when looking at the taxidermy wolf after having all other pieces.  In order to encourage players to look at it, I cut and added a wolf howl that would play 75 seconds after getting all other toy pieces.  With further playtesting, we saw most players would immediately head towards the wolf.

The Hallway

This section takes the place of the short hallway, giving many players a moment of panic when they first open the door and see this impossible space.

For this area I was responsible for light fixture placement, lighting, and pacing out the Wendigo chase sequence.  The chase sequence in particular required giving the player enough time walking through the hall to start becoming complacent and timing the Wendigo’s run to make it feel as though he’s baring down on the player while also giving them a reasonable amount of time to pass the trigger to de-activate him.  I also did audio construction and implementation for the Wendigo’s chase sequence and the light bulbs shorting out.

The Void

This area is between the Long Hallway and Final Room.  I designed it as a moment of otherworldly quiet after the climactic moment of being chased down the hallway by the Wendigo, both to give the players a brief time to recover and to also impress upon the strangeness of the grave at the center of this area.

I created this section’s landscape, population, audio, and lighting.

Here, the horror ambiance music dies down, which I replaced with a quiet breeze.  I switched audio cued by doors and replaced slams with muted shutting.  I laid down a trail of leaves that leads players across a primitive grave covered in stones, inferred to belong to the little girl, and towards another set of doors.

Large rocks surround most of this area, both to obstruct the view of the hallway behind and the room ahead, but also to minimize the necessity of invisible walls to keep the players from falling off the level

The Final Room

This space—small, dark, and quiet—is designed to lure players into a false sense of security before the final confrontation with the Wendigo.  I was responsible for its geometry, upheaved clutter, and audio cues for the doors, the Wendigo’s static, and the grandfather clock.

This room was a very late addition to the game.  I wanted the player to visit the girl’s grave in a surreal moment out in the wilderness, but the interior spaces were much easier to control.

I also felt the game shouldn’t strictly end with the Wendigo killing the player.  In order to achieve this, I reused our grandfather clock mesh and audio here.  Taking inspiration from the first note in the game, written by another designer, I decided the player would wait in this room without touching the final door.  After two real-time minutes pass, the clock chimes seven and the game cuts to credits, accompanied by a piano piece instead of the usual soft static.  For this ending I created the ghost hunting license the player is presented in the credits, and another designer wrote the time delay script.

Scripting

I wrote a short script that transitions the black painting canvasses to grotesque eyeballs once the Wendigo had been triggered.

I also wrote the script for the final door handle interaction, which originally just handled a sound effect and later served as the hooks for the Wendigo’s cue.

Download the game here or here.