Portfolio | Jonas Holmlund
Game Design and Level Design
Crawl Space
Summary
Crawl Space is a Reverse horror stealth game where you play as a evil parasite Invading a Alien research station populated by cute charming aliens, the player utilizes a possession mechanic to safely move around the station by possessing the Aliens.
Roles:
Timeframe:
Engine:
Team:
Genre:
Target length:
Tools I used:
Narrative, Gameplay Programing
7 Weeks
Unity
3 designers, 3 3D-artists
Stealth
10 min
Unity, Rider, GIMP2
Challenges
One of the big challenges in the development was the lack of programming experience within the team. We decided to focus on one core mechanic and develop it rather than having a bunch of interacting mechanics. We therefore focused a lot of attention on the possession system and Guard AI to make those mechanics feel as good as possible.
My contribution
Narrative
My main focus during the project was narrative design. The experience i've had from other gameprojects and the way i play games is that most people aren't interested to read text when playing games unless thats the premise they buy into when starting the game. So one of the biggest challenges was in how to tell the narrative rather than what to tell. The story itself is very basic as most video game stories, it's about a small alien parasite escaping on a Spacestation and trying to kill all captains and get out. I decided that the easiest way to tell the story within the timeframe of 10 min was through using 2 cutscenes, one at the start to establish the setting and location, and one at the end to create a satisfying ending that fit s with the theme of the project as well as being a bit of a twist.
I used Cinemachine and the Timeline editor when creating the cutscenes, i started by making panning shots that traveled through the level to better establish the layout and where the targets were. We chose to do this to make the objective of each level more clear and remove confusion. The intro cutscene was created as to simulate CCTV fotage and made to establish the setting and theme of the game.
The harder cutscene to create was the ending cutscene, I wanted to simulate the experience as seen through a guard watching the CCTV footage viewpoint with the twist of yourself being the final victim to the parasite, setting up the scene utilised a lot of changed animations from the characters as well as repositionings etc in the Unity timeline.
Some other systems I made
Lightswitch activation/deactivation script.
a quite simple script that moves a colission box up or down triggering lights to activate or deactivate, it also calls on 2 scripts in the guard prefabs changing the sice and angle of their viewcone.
Information prompts
I created a script that activated UI prompts when entering a triggerbox. The triggerbox saves the text in a string and then displays it as a UI text element.
Respawn system
The respawn system is a combination of 3 scripts where one gathers the location of the player when they enter a hitbox, the other stores the location of the first when the scene reloads and the last moves the player to the saved location when it lods in to the level and finaly the saved location is nullified when you load out of a level to avoid spawning in the wrong location.
Cutscene Activator
The cutscene activator tells the game to play a timeline sequence when the new scene loads in, keeps track of the time that it should play for, deactivates unecessery cameras once its done and stores the scene ID in a player.pref to prevent it from playing again if the scene is reloaded. In some scenes as the intro and final cutscene scenes it also loads the next scene when it's done.
The Team
Design
Art
Jonas Holmlund
Isaac Olander
Aldo Sartori
Abenthy Lillieström
Alexander Johansson
Rebecka Näsberg
Music
Teodor Huldt