Haunted Manor: Play with Me
Dead boy's room
Main antagonist of the game is a ghost of a boy. His father, director of the children camp in 1950s', got crazy after his wife's death. He was so afraid that something bad can happen to his son as well, that he locked the boy in the secret room at the camp's attic for 5 years, until the boy died in sudden fire that happened in the building.
Project Description
Single mother sends her little son to the private pension for children to spend the summer. He often writes letters to her, which describe his holidays. But then mother receives strange letter from her son, that didn’t write to her for a while. The handwriting looks very fast and curve, like the boy hurried to finish and send his letter. Short text haltingly tells the mother, that there’s something strange in the camp, boy hears crying and knocking from his room’s ceiling. That the children around become strange and silent. And even educator and guard become nervous. Boy asks his mother to take him away from the pension, because he’s afraid and feels something bad will happen soon. PC calls her son, but his phone is not available. Then she calls the camp (camp’s phone is in the office building), where after some calls little girl (someone else’s daughter that had rest in the pension) took phone and was crying «Mom, please, take me away from here!..». After that words connection was dropped, and PC couldn’t call to the camp again – no one took phone, no answer. After this situation PC decides to go to the pension as soon as possible – her son’s letter and girl’s crying told her something horrible happened there. The woman takes special bus and goes to the camp to understand, what happened, and look for her son.Haunted Manor: Play with Me
Roles:
Senior Game Designer Narrative Designer
Responsibilities:
♦ Created the story concept, made presentation and pitched it to the stakeholders and publishers.
♦ Negotiated with producers from USA via e-mail, skype, organized meetings in Kiev.
♦ Created tasks for artists, animators, programmers, composers, QA team, controlled all the production cycle, made play test of the game during all the development stages.
Research
♦ Made a wide research of target theme, architecture (“Guilded Age” in USA), history of children camps and pensions in that region, scouts traditions and habits. Read plenty of books and articles on children psychology, outdoors games, beliefs and fears. Prepared list of references from literature, movies and games for the team.
♦ Created representative mood- and reference boards on Pinterest to help the team with general understanding
♦ Assisted Art Director with creating palette and style board for Art Guide
♦ Conducted research into motivation and engagement mechanics fitting our target audience.
Text and narrative elements
♦ Wrote the whole scenario, including the main plot, global quests, side quests, characters, their nature, motivations and relation to the PC, dramatic moments and cinematic descriptions.
♦ Wrote all in-game texts including player character’s sentences (in response to any interaction), dialogues, item descriptions, puzzle games instructions, songs, player character’s notebook, quests, tasks and objectives.
♦ Made huge work in building narrative connections between all game elements, so that all interactions, puzzles and hooks appear in the perfect moment, empower the story and lead player from one objective to another in a natural way.
Characters
♦ Created the narrative concept for 1 Player character and 9 NPCs with their background, behavior patterns, motivation and visual references
♦ Visualized “relations map” for the characters.
♦ Created tasks for concept artists, character artists and animators to bring the characters to life.
♦ Created tasks for voice overs for outsource company, has chosen voice actors from provided candidates, made feedbacks on results.
♦ Prepared basic storyboard for all in-game cinematics and animations, performed stage direction for artists and animators to get correct frames and solid cinematics.
♦ Made the full GDD with all quest chains, objects, puzzles, mini-games, locations descriptions, dialogues, narrative information, sound specifics, game atmosphere.
♦ Designed 40 fullscreen locations with 4-8 interactive zoom-zones in each, created basic schematic wireframes for them.
♦ Designed mechanics for 18 puzzle mini-games, created schemes for artists and flowcharts for developers.
♦ Designed 17 hidden object fullscreen scenes with lists of interactions and items to be found.
♦ Provided location maps with all possible player interactions and sequences for developers and testers.
♦ Concepted the game features mechanics.
♦ Designed the map for the game, concepted “map teleportation” feature, locations unlocks and hint marks on the map.
♦ Concepted game UI.
♦ Made periodical gameplay test sessions.
♦ Processed publisher’s feedbacks and also alpha players’ surveys to improve the game on all stages of development.
Work examples
Please contact me if you wish to see more examples of my work, including GDDs and Game Writing.
- Period : 02.2012 - 02.2013
- Company : Top Evidence studio
- Publisher : BigFish Games
- Team Size : ~20
- Duration : 8 hours
Blinded girl
"My eyes! I can't see! Please, help me! Where is my mom?.. Mommy, will I ever see again? Will I ever see you?"