This is an escape room visual novel, inspired by games like Zero Escape and no-one has to die, in which the player must solve puzzles on a sliding scale of difficulty in order to escape ever more complicated rooms.
The game follows Kai, who travels across the country to an abandoned facility in the middle of nowhere in search of her missing partner, only to find herself kidnapped and trapped in a hellish labyrinth full of puzzles.
In-between escape segments, as is usually the case in games of this kind, the player talks to other characters and makes progress through the story. This gradually reveals the purpose for which they were brought to the facility and the secret
behind her partner's disappearance.
The project's game design document is in a clear enough state to enable production to commence, with some systems still to be blocked out. The latest version of the document can be viewed at the link below, and a first-pass vertical
slice of the first level is playable.
I wrote the game design document, blocking out the game's narrative considerations, but also the granular detail of how the programmed systems should work - for instance, how narrative choices should function, what different states
the game should be able to be in to accommodate different systems, the minutiae of various data objects and how they interact with each other, and what categories of audio should exist.
I then set about implementing a vertical slice of the game - the first escape level, the vintage office - following the specification I designed in the document. The input system uses Unity asset Rewired to accommodate multiple controller types,
and FMod to handle the game's various audio requirements, including the ability to fade audio in and out or pipe sounds between different channels for easier and more granular modulation.
For the level design, I used art assets from the Unreal Marketplace and put them together in Unreal Engine 5 to make the game look nicer out of the box. Additionally, I used Unreal's level sequencer to create the cinematic cutscenes and camera
movements, editing the resulting footage later in Premiere Pro to posterize it slightly to give it a sort of Nintendo DS vibe.
For highlighting interaction objects in levels, the game uses a combination of 2D colliders and Unity Shader Graph: when the player
cursor hovers over an interactable object's collision polygon, the background takes a cutout texture of that object from the background and uses it as a base to add a colour overlay to the background image's material.
For character design, I'm using Reallusion's Character Creator 4.
