Hector-More | ronaldvan

Hector

Research

The purpose of this project was to invoke a certain emotion or to have the player play a role of someone/something.
The goal first is to find games for references on what the game should be like.
My goal was to invoke some sense of sadness or loneliness which was featured in games like "In Loving Memory", a DigiPen game or "MARCH", a browser-based game.
My goal was also to figure out spaces/levels that players would go through to have these emotions invoked.
I looked at "The Beginner's Guide", "What Remains of Edith Finch", and "Stanley Parable" which all of these games helped tell a story of someone's life through the space that each game takes place in.

Planning

The picture on the left/top below is the early version of what paths that players would take to get through the game.
I drew small rooms to represent what players are to expect in them and it is how I would build each space out for the game.
I also made some small props in each room to tell myself how it would look like when I work on that room.
The picture on the right/bottom below is an updated version of what the game has and would've had and it was my checklist for adding into the game.
This would help in giving me an idea of what I'll be making instead of using a reference each space in the game since I used no picture references to make each room.

Implementation

The first video is the prototype where I built out most of the game's room and it has some of the proper triggers to lead players to places where they were expected to go.
I didn't have any set dressing and narration in the game yet because I wanted to focus on laying out the rooms first so I can develop the story for the game before adding all of the other pieces..
The second video is the production build where I add my narration but no props or set dressing yet.
I wanted to focus on more of the level sequences and narration since these would be important in how players would traverse through most of the levels.

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Challenges

This project was my second run in using Unreal where I had some more knowledge of Unreal but some of the stuff I was working with were new like the Dialogue system, the Landscape tool, and some of the conversion of static mesh from geometry brushes.
I had to voice the narrator throughout the whole game where I had lots of grammatical errors throughout it even when I wrote the script for the whole game in general.
I had to make sure the voices don't overlap and that triggers were in the right spots for the players to not get stuck because the game becomes unplayable at that point.
The game was in between emotions and roleplaying because the players would be getting emotions of sadness or loneliness but they would also be roleplaying as Hector who's narrating his life for the player.
I had to make sure each experience would be unique to the next player since the game would become a sort of personal experience based off of the story they played through.

Lessons Learned

Dialogue system in Unreal isn't the greatest but it worked for what I needed from it which I wished I had greater control on stopping my dialogue and subtitles when I cross over to a new dialogue.
The performance was a bit better compared to my work on "Gone with the Gnomes" since I had more knowledge on the level tools of Unreal and was able to make lots of cool scenes and rooms for players to explore.
Next time I write my scripts for reading, I need a proofreader to write better lines and also I learned that I can voice lots of nice lines for the game.
I learned that I can also develop a narrative that can be interacted by players in different ways and can show these emotions' through the spaces I developed as well.
I would also want to make more pathways for players so that I could make a much more dynamic experience but time is quite the restraint.
I enjoyed the impact that I got from developing something similar to "The Beginner's Guide" and "Stanley Parable" where I give players that choice to follow an experience of someone else.
Additionally, I invoked hidden mystery where the game left lots of mystery on Hector and his life in between places.