Date: August 2021 - May 2022
Role: Lead Game Designer
Team Size: 8-16
Platform: PC
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Responsibilities include designing the main mechanics and game feel of the game as well as overseeing level design and acting as liaison between programmers and level designers
Achromatic is a first person horror game in which you play as an engineer who's been hired to repair a broken down carousel at a park, only to find things not as they seem.
The game has two main components. The first is a non real geometric environment that wraps around the player. The player will find that they enter rooms that are bigger on the inside than on the outside as well as turning corners and discovering areas that lead back in on themselves.
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The second component is the games light system. The entire world is in black and white, but through the use of light the player is able to reveal the world in color, thereby revealing hidden information at the same time and allowing the player to see the monster that's chasing them.
The first challenge in designing for Achromatic was trying to figure out how to create levels for an environment that was supposed to wrap in on itself.
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Taking reference from similar games such as Anti-Chamber, I developed a simple system of teleporting the player with uniform hallways. By requiring the player to go through hallways that block line of sight to both the starting and exiting room, we are able to swap rooms in and out. This creates a "non-Euclidean" effect for the player allowing us to surprise them with an adapting environment.
The above image illustrates how we can swap out rooms as the player moves through the environment.
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This can be used to for both puzzle design purposes and to lead the player directly into new areas/levels of the game
The lighting system is the active way in which the player interacts with and explores the world. This is meant to be the way the player discovers hidden information and how they see the enemies around them.
The first version of this mechanic was a simple on screen flashlight that the player had on hand. While this was easy to implement, it was rather limiting in it's usage and was also something that was already a common trope in other horror games.
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In addition, testing found that while the player always had access to their flashlight, the odd stuck position of it on screen resulted in it being difficult to use.
To solve these issues, I removed the idea of holding the "flashlight" from the player​ and instead made any light source in the game be able to reveal hidden details and information. These light sources could range from theater lights to the light of a stage projector.
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This moved the game away from the trope of the player using a flashlight, and through testing it proved to also be easier to utilize, as now that the light sources were no longer fixed on the screen it meant that players had more freedom in how they positioned themselves in relation to the light sources.
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The above image shows the version of the flashlight mechanic used in testing. The player had to avoid a hidden monster that would chase them around the map.
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Cinematic Outline
Tool
While developing for Achromatic, I was also in charge of making the pipeline between level design and art as smooth as possible.
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To do this I developed a Cinematic Outline Tool that the level designers could use to plan out animated moments in the game
These outlines, once placed by the level designers and given a description would then automatically compile themselves into a list that the art team could then use and make tasks off of.