WHITEOUT – KIERAN MCGOWAN

For my final year project, I have created a survival horror game that was similar to popular titles such as Amnesia, Penumbra and Outlast.

In Whiteout, the player will be exploring the station in order to find a way of escaping. While exploring the station the player will encounter the monster  which acts as the main antagonist of the game, encountering each other throughout the different levels and the story as a whole. The player is unable to fight monster and as such will have to avoid it by avoiding it or hiding in designated locations to stop the monster from chasing them.

As inspiration for my game, I also wanted to looked at John Carpenter’s The Thing. I enjoyed the setting of The Thing because of how isolated the main characters were from the rest of the world which prevented them from seeking help and also made them question who could be The Thing, which opens up a number of possibilities for games. Because of this I decided to set my game in Antarctica and have it take place during the winter season where the environment experiences several months of nights that cause the temperature to drop dramatically. This creates the idea that the player is truly isolated with no hope of rescue and opens up the possibility of additional mechanics such as hypothermia.

As part of my game I wanted the main focus of the game to be around mechanics and atmosphere. I wanted to create a suspenseful environment where the player is always on alert with their surroundings similar to the feelings players got when they played Amnesia. Additionally, I wanted the player to solve a variety of different puzzles such as code locks and passwords but also more elaborate puzzles like moving boxes to traverse dangerous terrain or timed-events as a way to make tasks more interesting and engaging for the player.

An example of such a mechanic is the physics pick-up, where the player is able to pickup and move certain objects. This opened up a lot of ideas for future puzzles where the player had to climb boxes to reach a higher position, place boxes on buttons to keep a door open, fixing machinery by placing the correct item where it needs to go (I.g. a broken switch).

A number of puzzles can be solved by reading notes that tell the player what’s happened. This was a way of encouraging exploration

The monster also played a huge role within the game because this would be the main antagonist of the story which the player would encounter throughout the story. I came up with several designs for the monster, each with their own characteristics and visual traits. The crawler was the most favorite design as it had to largest room for possibilities such as crawling on the ceiling, reaching under crouching areas and  had the highest freak-factor out of the other designs.

 

The final product of my project is a 5 minute demo that contains the base mechanics that the player will be using as well as a few simple puzzles and an encounter with the game’s monster. After I was finished with the game I have decided to continue developing the project into a full game, improving upon existing mechanics and expanding upon the original design.