Heredity | 2023

In Heredity, players take on the role of Riley, a teen girl who's life changes as she discovers a passage to another world within their old family mansion. She and her brother must survive the night from the dangers lurking their ancestral home and confront the shadows of their family's dark past. I worked on developing this game with three other students as my graduation project from Bilgi University. The GDD we prepared can be found here.

Role: Gameplay Designer, Narrative Designer, Cinematics & Programming
Platform: PC
Genre: Third Person - Horror

Screenshots:

Teaser:

Gameplay:

Narrative

The game kicks off with a flashback, immersing you in a childhood game of hide 'n seek between two siblings deep in the woods. As darkness descends, the older sister, Claire, convinces her brother to play one final round. But the innocent fun takes a chilling turn as Claire, the character you control, searches for her brother amidst eerie sounds echoing from the woods. Ominously with each approaching noise her necklace begins to shimmer until the chapter reaches its gut-wrenching conclusion with Claire discovering her brother's lifeless body.

Fast forward to many years later, a struggling family moves into an old house, setting the stage for the main story. The focus shifts to yet another two siblings grappling with mixed emotions amid financial woes following their father's death. Riley, the elder sibling, sees the move as a fresh start—a chance to escape city life and find solace in a spacious ancestral mansion. However, Tom, still mourning their father's loss, remains indifferent, and the mother is still haunted by the memories tied to the house and its dark family history, soon to be revealed.

Assuming the role of Riley, you assist with the move, engaging with other characters and exploring the mysterious mansion. Before their mother leaves for a night shift back to the city, she entrusts Riley with a family heirloom—the same necklace Claire wore in the opening chapter, and asks her to look after Tom while she's gone for the night.

Later in the night we see heavy rain and storm around the mansion. While Tom grumbles about the old mansion, Riley attempts to contact their mother, only to find there is no signal. Suddenly, the power cuts, plunging them into darkness punctuated by a loud noise. With a mix of apprehension and determination, Riley takes charge, investigating the noise and stumbling upon a bizarre revelation: a different version of the house, shrouded in mystery and danger.

Switching perspectives to Tom, the narrative intensifies as he ventures in the house on his own, encountering a creature lurking within the mansion's shadows. As the siblings reunite in a desperate bid for safety, their journey unfolds with suspense as they make their escape to the study room, where Riley saw a gun prior in the game. While they're running for their lives Tom falls down and hurts his leg, leaving Riley to face the danger alone. The game ends in a cliffhanger as Riley grabs the gun and shoots the creature. Overall, the story dives into generational family trauma and the supernatural from the perspectives of caring siblings depending and not giving up on each other.

Development

The game development process was quite structured and guided by our university instructors. Initially, we assembled our team for extensive discussions and brainstorming sessions, drawing from our shared gaming preferences, individual strengths and weaknesses on technical levels, and realistic project expectations. These discussions were finalized by the creation GDD. With approval from our head teacher, we started task delegation and division of responsibilities as our next step.

Our first task was prototyping our core gameplay mechanics, particularly focusing on our protagonist's necklace which served as a dynamic indicator, illuminating and adjusting its intensity to alert the player about in-game threats, based on proximity. We made our characters in MetaHuman Creator by Epic and implemented default Unreal mannequin animations to it. However, I worked on editing these animations for a more natural look since we aimed for a cinematic feeling in every aspect of our game.

The next step was for my teammates to build and set dress the locations where the game would take place. Once this was complete, I concentrated on refining player movement mechanics and optimizing the camera system to suit our environments. Additionally, I worked on creating a cinematic intro showcasing a car journey, using line tools in Unreal and simple scripts to move the car around it. Later, I used the sequencer to film the whole section.

At this point, I had many things written down already regarding the narrative of our game in our GDD, but as we kept working on our project some things had be to taken out, and new things were added too. After re-scaling our narrative, I started writing dialogues and used Replica Studio to bring these dialogues to life with AI-generated voices. After I gathered the dialogue files, I used the MetaHuman plugin to generate facial animations for our characters. Thanks to this plugin, I managed to automate this process and skip making facial animations for each dialogue in the game.

Once the setup for triggering cinematic moments and dialogues in the game was ready, I started working on implementing dialogue options, where the player can choose what to say and receive answers depending on their choice. I didn't want to list the whole dialogue in these options like how many games do, instead, I wanted a more subtle approach, so I decided to categorize these options based on emotions, like being mean or supportive etc.

Another thing I implemented was a common feature for horror games, heavily inspired by titles such as Until Dawn. When one of the characters faces the creature in an unexpected reveal, the player has to complete a quick time event in order to avoid it.

Perhaps the most complicated system in our game was to implement a third-person shooting mechanic, which is given to the player at the end of the game, where the main character takes a bold step facing the creature. I worked on this part in heavy detail because I wanted it to live up to the climax of the game. The first thing I considered was that this is an old mansion, and the gun the protagonist finds must be an old rifle. So I worked on making the rifle sound loud and create a lot of smoke particles once fired. Also because it's not a well-constructed weapon and the protagonist is not an experienced gun handler, it has a strong recoil to the player. This is also supported by a camera shake that's initiated once the gun is fired.