Sha'DO Museum — Gianandrea Ferrara

plot

An ancient egyptian Pharaoh trapped on the walls of a Museum, He will use his dominance over the realm of the living and shadows to reach his Sarcophagus to have some peace in the afterlife.

Overview

Engine: UE4 Team of 3

A puzzle arcade, where you can manipulate the enviroment to creat a path for the next level. Our idea was to give control to the player on how to complete each level with the tools at his disponals. Our mission was to remake and diversify the core gameplay of “In My Shadow”. We took it as main inspiration.

OUR VISION

GAme Mechanics

At the beginning of pre-production, we cut the mechanics of destructible objects, initially due to a lack of assets. However, after adding the ability to stack one object on top of another, we decided to completely remove the mechanic.

It was also one of the last one we managed to add due of technical limitations and other design challenges that we had to manage.

We studied how constriction works on Valheim, when constructing every objects have snapshots to place them perfectly on top of another but it’s also possible to place them in a less precise way due of the range of the snapshot, there is also a color code that teaches the player if an object can be stacked or not. We found this way of managing the mechanic perfect for us.

The first 2 prototipyes, at first We where only able to use simple geometry for objects.

We wanted to create an hierarchy, to deliver clear instructions to the objects the player can stack and how. In the end We decided to cut this system to focus on polishing what we already implemented.

Our current result, where the objects on the top snaps onto the lower one making possible to create a simple ladder to use.

We also managed to make capable the player to rotate the object on top without rotating the bottom one.

Developer Insight

PERSONAL GOALS

Our first goal was to produce at least 20 levels, during the production We decided to cut to 4, to focus ourselves on implementation quality.
The most challenging part was in creating our first prototype, as our main reference was developed on Unity, while we were working with Unreal Engine, which is more focused on 3D rather than 2D.

After 3 months we changed the scope of the project due of our team made only by Game Designers so We had to acquire knowledge on visual scripting and art beacuse we managed to add later a programmer to fulfill programming assignements.