Save Her
A GameJam winner horror game made on Unreal Engine 4.27 in 2 weeks, that in the first week of release it reached more than 800+ views and 150+ downloads and reached the top charts for "new and popular", "Pixel Art", "Games" and "horror" genre on Itch.io.
My Role:
On "Save Her", I worked as Technical Gameplay Designer, and also managed and set up portions of the project, for example, source control
Game Preview
Post Mortem
What Went Right:
01. AI
The AI on this project is quite interesting. It uses the Unreal Engine 4 Behavior Tree in order to work. It took me quite a bit of time in order to make this AI the best it can be. Moreover, I did my best in order to make the AI future-proof so it can be updated on newer patches of the game.
02. Theme
We worked really hard on making the game feel scary and making the player feel unsafe in most of the locations in the game. I worked on the movement and gameplay in order to make this happen. The player character being slower than the ghost, having low stamina and the camera being slower than the flashlight are some of the features that make it work.
03. Feedback
After releasing the game on itch.io we got a large amount of feedback, which we used to make future versions of the game better. Moreover, we are still looking at feedback and working on updates to this day(5/26/2022).
04. Player interest
After releasing the game, it quickly got into the top charts of the "horror games", "popular", "games", "Pixel Art" and "new and popular" charts on itch.io, even reaching the top 76 in the general games category.
05. Camera movement
It took quite some time to perfect the camera movement. In "Save Her" the flashlight moves before the player camera does, this happens with the intention to add more suspension to each camera movement and also make the player feel more helpless. It took quite some time to make it work, since adding too much of it would make the game feel laggy, and too little wouldn't give that much effect.
What Went Wrong:
01. Time
Our initial goal was way too big for the 14 days we had. So we ended up changing the scope of our project prior to launch, we played with UI instead of a dialogue system and we used text instead of images and animations.
02. Dialogue System
Initially, we had in mind a dialogue system for telling the story. However, due to time constraints, we ended up using UI in order to tell the story to the player.
03. Bugs
The game had a lot of bugs, so we ended up spending a lot of time fixing them. This, however, proved to be a good decision, since on launch we didn't have any major bugs, and the ones that were found by the players, were quickly fixed and updated on the next patches.
04. Packaging
When we tried packaging the project for the first time we had issues with some assets, so we ended up needing to investigate all of the problematic files in order to delete them and package the project.
05. AI Visuals
We had planned to add more animations to the AI but due to time constraints, we ended up just adding the basic movement and basic jumpscare.
Game Pictures
Dining Room
Picture of the Dining Room area in the game.
Basement
Platforming area on the basement.
Memories...
Playable memories inside the game.
