DON'T PLAY ALONE...
Man of Medan - the first game in The Dark Pictures Anthology. Every game in The Dark Pictures Anthology - a series of intense, standalone horror games – will be playable in multiplayer! There are two modes - Shared Story (online 2 player co-op) and Movie Night (up to 5 players offline couch play).
The story of Man of Medan starts off on a dive boat in the South Pacific. With a rumoured WWII wreck to find, and plenty of on-deck partying to be had, our group of 4 young Americans and their skipper Fliss get ready for what should be the trip of a lifetime…but it doesn’t go quite to plan. As the day unfolds, and a storm rolls in, they find themselves trapped on board a ghost ship. Subjected to unimaginable stress and terror, they must try to find a way to escape the ship and its sinister history.
ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Setting up levels with the in-house 'Storyboard Tool' so that we could play the game from a basic top-down view for the exploration segments, and interactive storyboard art for the more film-like moments.
- Creating the moment-to-moment flow and logic for branching narratives within Level Blueprint within Unreal Engine 4.
- Blocking out the game spaces, sticking to original blueprint reference of era appropriate WW2 ships, whilst making adjustments to serve gameplay.
- Scripting cinematic sequences, integrating animation data, instantiating cameras and other game elements and interactions
- Balancing & adjusting the pacing of the sequences based on playtesting and Game Director feedback.
CONTRIBUTIONS
As a Designer on 'Man of Medan' , I had to bounce between 'Level Designer' and 'Cinematic Designer' on a regular basis. Implementing not only the base level flow, scripted events ( such as jump scares), item / collectable interactions and of course fixed angle cameras for exploration segments, but also having to apply my cinematography knowledge, to craft film-like shots that would serve as the cinematic presentation of the bulk of the levels.
Of particular note, "Plunged" and "Pressure" were two chapters in the game that I had strong ownership over, and had to iterate on them over the course of development, to better suite the pacing, horror and overall feel as outlined by the Game Director.
'PLUNGED'
I oversaw a good portion of 'Plunged' but most notable a sequence involving the characters 'Julia' and 'Alex' as they journey through a waterlogged cargo area. Both characters are being pursued by one of the games antagonists, 'Olson' and both end up being thrown from a walkway into the water below.
Both characters then start hallucinating very different things, and over the course of development the vision of this was changed due to budget and time constraints, so I pitched the idea of Julia's hallucination being her falling into the wreckage of the aircraft from the beginning of the game, and having the player experience a variation of that sequence, only for her to envision Alex as a drowned corpse in one of the seats in the wreckage before she is dragged back to the surface.
Original sequence from earlier in the game.
The WW2 Pilot corpse that can be found in the remains of the crashed plane is replaced with Alex in this sequence.
Original sequence from earlier in the game.
'PRESSURE'
'Pressure' was a particular sequence that most of my time was spent on as not only did it have to work with two players simultaneously, but it also had to account for relationship traits that the player has been making throughout the game, and many different outcomes based on player choice in the scene. Videos like these, perfectly illustrated the many different outcomes this scene can take.