Shrouded Depths
Level Design Lead
A survival horror game where the player must navigate the twisting hallways of an old ferry ship in order to repair its generator. Armed with their trusty harpoon gun and some amount of wits, they must battle against the encroaching madness while trying to avoid getting lost in the depths.
Project Summary
Project Contribution
Project Goal
A year long project featuring a team of thirty-two people. Shrouded Depths served as our senior capstone project. A first person survival horror game, the player is tasked with exploring the bottom of a Louisiana fishing boat, searching for clues and the means to repair the ship’s engine. Armed with a harpoon gun to help fight off whatever is lurking below, this project acts as a culmination of four year’s worth of study.
Helped lead the Level Design team in constructing dynamic play spaces that help thrill and excite players with engaging design. Personally greyboxed and constructed the frames for multiple iterations of play space throughout project’s lifecycle. Helped develop prop placement and individual room design and layout. Work on iterating play space based on player and team feedback.
Create an eldritch based horror game that utilized a variety of effects and unique level design to develop ambiance and an acute sense of dread in the player that builds slowly throughout the game’s runtime.
Initial Development: Boats
For the original iterations of Shrouded Depths, the intention was to have players located on the top side of an old fishing vessel. With that in mind it was my job to design and start building these play spaces. At first my main goal was to simply build out a framework that the player could operate it. With most of my testing devoted to differing sizes and fiddling with the interior room layouts.
Second Sprint: Mazes
After extensive playtesting within the boat playspace and receiving feedback from myriad sources, it was internally decided that the boat was not working as we hoped it would. As such it was decided that we would pivot to taking the player below decks into the bowels of the ship. As such I was then tasked with designing this new playspace from scratch. Originally the goal was to have several maze like structures that got progressively more challenging for the players to explore. Above you can see several concept sketches for what planning out how I wanted to construct things looked like.
Eventually, I sat down and built out the mazes utilizing the hallway toolkit. Three mazes were built with each one becoming more complicated as you went. The goal for each was to get to the end an acquire an item that would take you on to the next on. Above are shown Mazes 1 and 3. Once that was done other designers got to go through and populate them with monsters, initial props and lighting.
My Work
In order to help with this I took time to develop example models containing stand ins for props, lighting, and even monster attack zones to help other members of the team visualize how we could utilize the spaces I was building.
Towards the end of our first development sprint we finally locked in a layout that suited our needs. Once that was done we were able to fully assign rooms and start filling them with placeholder props and other design work such as windows. Soon after one of our talented 3-D artists was able to create a fully realized model of our boat. Allowing us to finally move on from the greybox phase. Once the ship was modeled I got to go in and make sure props and layout remained consistent and to start sprucing things up with additional features like lighting and fog.
As I was developing these concepts I knew I wanted to make sure they were easily editable for both myself and other designers who would possibly be working on this. As such my first task was designing a toolkit of various hallways that could easily be clicked together a moved around easily. Individually they’re nothing much to look at but the modular nature definitely saved a lot of work in the long run.
After a lot of deliberating it was decided that the best course of action was to remove both the 2nd and 3rd maze from the game. They were simply to obtuse and confusing and trying to maintain them would simply eat up to much development time. As such I went through and streamlined the first maze to act as our main playspace. At first I ironed it out so it acted as basically a straight line before going back through and adding a couple branching paths to let the player feel like they had choice in their journey. This final maze, as shown on the right. Would be what we ended up moving forward with in the final development sprint. Once the exterior work was all done my team got to go in and add detail work to bring it to life.
As time went on the scope of the game changed and shifted and as such the requirements of our play space changed along with it. As such I ended up having to make many, many boats. As shown above I tried to make sure to keep every edition of the boat that I made so I could easily drag them around to compare them all with each other whenever I needed to figure out details.
Once I had my toolkit assembeld, I did a few final drafts to make sure I knew exactly how I wanted things when I started. These last sketches made sure to include additional details such as monster placements, dead-ends, and one way ones used to keep the player moving forward.
Unfortunately it became clear very quickly that these playspaces were not meeting our design goals. They simply took to long to explore even for players who knew what they were doing and most playtesters never even managed to get out of maze 3. As such it was back to the drawing board to figure out how to restructure things to be more streamlined.
I also got to help out with this process, working to design interesting room layouts, creepy moments and adding general ambience to help bring the horror elements of the game to the front. While macro level design and external building of playspaces is my main focus getting to do smaller scale/ more personal designs like these was a great challenge and a ton of fun to do.