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Phantom Light | 2022
I developed this FPS, Sci-fi and thrilling game as a final project for my “Advanced Game Development” course in Bilgi University. The players take on the role of a crew member who awakens from cryosleep to discover themselves on a ship that is under attack by aliens. With the help of her AI companion, she has to escape the ship before it is too late.
Role: Solo Project
Platform: PC
Genre: Sci-Fi - FPS - Horror
Screenshots:
Teaser:
Trailer:
Gameplay:
Narrative
The story of Phantom Light unfolds within a doomed spaceship, focusing on a character simply referred to as Talon 29, who must navigate her way to the evacuation pods. Upon awakening, she senses something amiss, noting the sudden wake-up from cryosleep and the spaceship's deviation from its planned course. Her immediate task is to fix the cooling chambers, a critical structure for the spaceship's engines to function.
The player is encouraged to explore the room brimming with sleeping pods. If they do so, they will encounter other crewmates in the pods, but they won't be as lucky as themselves. Some will be trapped due to malfunctioning pods, others already dead. Through the ship's integrated UI system, the player can receive their own tasks as well as their teammates' tasks and code names. The absence of personal names and identical tech suits hint at the possibility that all crew members are clones.
As players venture out of the room, they are met with crumbling walls, loud noises, and a shaken floor, likely caused by onboard explosions. Further along the corridor, they encounter soldiers defending against creatures breaching a door. This encounter emphasizes the threat and illustrates how the crew is combating it.
Continuing down the corridor, players encounter a security door, which they can unlock using their bioscan ability. Beyond lies a secure, silent room housing the cooling chambers. However, upon activation, the chambers malfunction, prompting the ship's AI to alert the player to the need for repairs to facilitate their departure from the ship.
With the guidance of their AI companion, the player dives deep into the ship's dark and damaged corridors, unraveling the mystery of what transpired during their slumber. The story climaxes with an open-ended revelation: the ship's route was sabotaged, prompting the premature awakening of the crew to defend the vessel, though it appears futile. Now the player has no chance but to evacuate to the nearest planet, which is said to be a very dangerous world.
Development
For this project, I gathered many assets in terms of animation and level building from Mixamo and Unreal Engine Marketplace before I started working on my game. I managed to compress the whole playthrough into a single level, which became the hub for most of my interaction scripts, such as enemy combat, weapon equipping, and more. The events that simulate things such as the deteriorating structure and ground shakes are also triggered here, as well as opening security doors and completing other types of quests.
While focusing mostly on the interactions with the game world inside the level blueprint, I mainly concentrated on getting the weapon script to work inside the player blueprint. The way I imagined the primary weapon was to have infinite ammo, with continuous automated fire only interrupted by cooldowns to avoid overheating the weapon. This system took some time to arrange and looking back at it now, this was probably not the best way to set it up; however, it worked the way it was intended for my game. The player blueprint also includes a system that allows to switch between third-person and first-person modes, but I used this feature mostly for debugging purposes and envisioned the game to be first-person from the start.
The last part of my development process was to create a simple enemy blueprint, since I had implemented my shooting logic, it was time to put it into good use! The enemy logic is fairly simple, centered around chasing the player character, and receiving damage when shot.
Conclusion
As I was working on this game, I learned a lot about programming in Blueprints to bring my design and narrative to life. Gathering the assets I needed was a challenge at first, but I managed to find enough resources to finalize my idea with the help of AI text-to-speech, Mixamo, and Unreal Engine marketplace. I learned how to utilize these platforms for my needs and continued to do so in my future projects. Moreover, I gained experience in level design in a way that allows me to integrate my narrative concepts with gameplay mechanics.
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