Project Overview

Class: Immersive Storytelling

Timeline: 2 months

Softwares: Unity, Generative AI, Adobe Creative Suite

Designers: Victoria, Esin, Iman, Aaron, Karina

Game Description

In "Rebecca's Legacy," Rebecca's tranquil life takes a dark turn when her seemingly healthy grandfather passed away. Driven by suspicion, Rebecca embarks on a journey to uncover the truth behind his sudden demise. One fateful night, while visiting her grandfather’s grave, she discovers a cryptic letter narrated by her late grandfather. Following his instructions, Rebecca enters her late grandfather’s home looking for answers.  Along the way, the player collects keys to unlock doors essential to unraveling the mystery. "Rebecca's Legacy" offers an immersive experience, blending narrative storytelling with interactive gameplay to captivate and challenge players as they strive to uncover the truth.

Full Walkthrough

Features

• In-Depth World Building: Delve into intricately designed rooms, each bursting with rich details that bring the game's world to life.
  
• Immersive Experience: Engage in the game from a first-person perspective, putting you directly in the heart of the action and story.
• Narrative-Driven Gameplay: Unfold the enigmatic storyline as you progress, with each step drawing you deeper into the compelling mystery.
• Challenging Puzzles and Interaction: Encounter a variety of puzzles that challenge your problem-solving skills and encourage interactive exploration.

Building Process

• First ideas:

We were initially inspired by the game “The Room” where the player has a puzzle box and also uses letters to try to solve a mystery. We also had inspirations from the topic of family secrets and intrigued by the eeriness and the concept of solving clues. We began by writting our ideas on the mural board: 

• Creating the game structure:

As you can probably see from our mural board, we began discussing the game structure, what kind of scenes we wanted to includes and how we could create a cool narrative. We settled on creating 5 scenes with it's own puzzle to solve, as well as a title scene and a cut scene to set the story. As mentioned, each room has a key or object to find in order to access the next. In every room, you are greeted with a letter to guide you. 

• Building the rooms:

We each decided to build our own rooms seperately, and then bring it over in to one computer. We decided on this method to allow everyone to work on the project. Each room was build with carefully chosen assets to create cohesiveness, and the feeling of being in "one house" even through it's seperate scenes. Each room was build from scratch using a lot of small assets to create a custom atmosphere considering the timeframe of this project.

• Creating 2D Assets

In order to give our game a very personalised feel, we decided on creating custom assets for the title scene, the cut scene, and our letters. They were created using a combination of different softwares such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects and generative AI tools like DAL-EE. 

The Letters

Title Scene

  1. Created using DAL-EE

  2. Animated with Photoshop and After Effects

Cut Scene:

  1. Created using Photoshop

  1. Animated with After Effects

Other Imagery

• Creating interactions and puzzles:

The most important interaction we needed was a way to communicate our letters in order to guide the player through the game. We decided on a collider system where the letter would pop up when the player touches it.

We then focused on creating little puzzles for each room, like finding keys to open doors, finding codes to open doors, or even using a magnifying glass to find clues. We wanted to design puzzles we could achieve considering our limited experience with Unity and coding, but after some hardworking, we were able to make all of our puzzles work.

• Assembling all the components

After adding sound, the last thing we needed to do was to compile everything we just went through in to one cohesive and playable game... easy right? After a lot of video tutorials and help from Chat GPT for the coding, we were able to produce a game we are really proud of!

Reflection

The outcome of our game was able to successfully reflect our concept of discovering and solving a mystery after the death of Rebecca’s grandpa. We found that the Unity Asset store and Sketchfab to work best for assets. At first, we were going to use a big haunted house mansion asset, however after running into difficulties with a large file and uploading the file to our google drive, we decided to all build our own scenes separately. There were some issues with packaging the scene files. However afterwards, the scenes were pieced together. We learned the importance of organizing/naming files, designing a cohesive space with a theme, and storytelling through Unity. We learned world building and narrative structures that exist in the media  gets people to play a game over and over. Going back to play a game  isn't just the technical aspects but the human stories that we tell through the games we make and how that resonates with the players. 

If we had more time, we would definitely add more details in order to immerse the user even more. We would add elements such a voiceover of the Grandpa reading the letter when the user comes in contact with the letters. Additionally, we would ideally improve functionality of the transitions between each scene and “Next” buttons. The gameplay could change each time you play, each room could unlock multiple objects just at different times based on your progress. This would see the player going back and forth between rooms they have been in and have to discover some new clues and possible other mini rooms that branch off from the main rooms. This would add layers to the game and allow for longer gameplay and possibly a multiplayer function.