Ghost Light
Summary: Ghost Light is a horror adventure game where you are thrown into a ghost town to solve to mystery of what happened to this town. Some ghosts are only visible in the light and some are only visible in the dark.
Role: Game Design, AI design, Programming, Level Design
Tasks: I was tasked with creating the lighting system in our game, and making sure the right object are appearing in the dark or just in the light. Along with programming and designing the AI for all ghosts. Programming the crystal collection and dialogue system.
Responsibilities: Ensure ghost AI and behavior works as intended, and that the flashlight stops at wall and uncovers objects in the dark correctly.
Game Link:
Development
Milestone 1 Screenshots
Challenges: Player navigation, engagement, and challenge
Player Navigation: To over come the challenge of player navigation and getting lost in our level we added more art assets on the ground to give the player a point of reference to tell that they are moving, otherwise traveling across a white makes it seem like you are not moving at all. We also added points of interest to hopefully give players an idea of where they are in the level.
Engagement: In the original design of the game, we had the player just collect crystals, we found it was not engaging enough so to increase engagement we added a story and more context to world to hopefully get players involved with the world.
Challenge: At first our game was basically unlosable; it did have a loss condition that could be met but it was really easy to never meet the loss condition. To increase challenge, we made it, so ghost moved much faster and more dynamically, along with adding a ghost type that constantly spawns to add to the chaos.
Skills and knowledge gained:
During the development of this game, I learned a lot about AI design, programming, creating challenge in a game and team work. For this year long project, I had to work in a team of 4. While working in this team the amount of knowledge and experience I gained about team work and management is invaluable, learning about how to explain the systems that I added to the game so that other team member can understand and use the new systems for themselves was knowledge I never knew I needed until working on this project. Many of the systems in Ghost Light need and understanding of how they work so that when members add art or other assets that they know how to set them up, so they work properly in-game. I’m excited to apply this new knowledge to my future project.