University Project - Final Semester
11 person team - Lead Designer
Summer - 2021
Umbralate is currently in active development, and entered Alpha on the 17th of July. A 20 minute vertical slice will be ready at the end of August, and present to our clients at Sumo Digital.
In Umbralate (Latin, Umbra - Shadow, Ambulate - Walk) the player controls a vampire trying to return to their coffin while avoiding the sun. The USP? The player controls the sun.
I am working in a team of 11 masters students, 3 designers, 3 artists, 3 programmers, 1 technical audio, and 1 producer. As lead designer, I am responsible for the levels and the design of the overall game, keeping the levels coherant and the design approachable. I communicate frequently with the other departmenets, requesting code, audio and art, providing technical documentation etc.
Designing the levels has been a great challenge, though highly enjoyable, trying to visualise what the player will see, how they will manipulate the shadows etc, I’ve never faced something like it. The small dioramas for levels means they had to be incredibly compact, and given the shadow mechanic, every object in the level casts a shadow, and could be a potential unintended solution.
Designing the Core Mechanic
Our brief from our University was “Substitute the core mechanic of a standard puzzle game, with a different mechanic”. We chose to substitute controlling a shield and hiding from a hazard with controlling a hazard and hiding behind shields. This was inspired by tales of Vampires hiding from the sun, and lurking in the shadows, but I always felt simply moving the vampire through stationary shadows wasn’t sufficiently “puzzling”. I mocked up a very quick example of the game in the day beforehand, showing it off to my team. The example was made in Blender, just showing off how the mechanics would work, and the entire team was on board with the idea, thinking of how the mechanics could be used, and where we could go with it.
Initially the sun would rotate 360 degrees around the level, but we feared players could simply exhaust all possible solutions by rotating the sun left or right, trivialising the puzzles, as such we added the sun’s pitch into the game, allowing the sun to also rotate between 30 and 60 degrees up and down, elongating or shortening the shadows.
The project requirements were to create a 20 minute vertical slice of a 2 hour experience, so we felt we needed to add more mechanics, just one or two, as this core mechanic could not carry a full 2 hour experience, 30 minutes at most. This lead to us prototyping numerous mechanics, from ice that melts in the sun, to pushable blocks with shadows. Soon we will cut the 10 mechanics down to 1 or 2, to keep the experience brief and concise, staying true to our core mechanic.
Designing the Levels
Designing the levels is the most challenging aspect of the game from a design standpoint. As the sun could be in countless locations at once, it was very hard to physically visualise, requiring levels to be prototyped and developed while moving a sun around the scene with real-time lighting. Levels are still being thoroughly tested and prototyped to decide what mechanics work, and what don’t, and more importantly, where the fun of the game lies.
Designing Additional Features
One thing we wanted to do was to encourage exploration of our little dioramas, this was achieved by hiding a candy inside each of them, entirely optional, but it encouraged the players to engage and look around. Completing the level with a candy collected would give the player a medal, additional medals were awarded for completing each level once, as well as completing a level without taking damage from the sun. This last one was important, as it created an agreement between the player and designers, that every level has a solution in which the vampire does not take any damage from the sun. This was in response to testing where we noticed that players would use their health as a resource, not the shield we intended it to be.
A live level select was also chosen to give the game a more adventurous feel, and make the world feel more connected, despite the small isometric dioramas. This has the vampire adventuring at night, and going into the levels during the day-time to escape from the sun.
Self-Assessment
While the project is still not over, this has been my favourite project to work on so far. I think the game is coming along incredibly well for a student project, we have iterated early, and been testing internally and externally from week 2 of the project. I am excited to polish and refine the game through alpha and finally submit the finished project.
Play Online
The game can be downloaded from my Itch.io page from the link below:
