Meme Forest

Term 4 CEA | Rapid Game Development 1 | 3 Weeks | UE4 | Team size: 5

Overview

Meme Forest is a first-person Grounded like horror game that uses a Microphone as one of the controls. The player shouts or makes noises to fill up the courage bar. The courage bar provides the player with the energy to run. When the Courage bar is depleted, the player is unable to move.

Hook

Unique microphone-based gameplay. Core gameplay is tied to player’s microphone; Player runs faster depending on how much he is shouting, Player lose if he laughs when a meme shows up.

Documents

Game Design Document

Goals

Game:

Collect all crying cats in the game and reach the house. You must shout to get courage for running. Stop and don’t make any sound while Momo (The Witch) is around or when a meme shows up

Personal:

We needed a dark/ scary jungle scene and decided to make the game in Unreal Engine. I saw it as a perfect opportunity to get familiar with unreal landscape tool. I planned to make the level as procedural as I could using splines, foliage, blueprints and other tools.

Responsibilities

Level Research, Conceptualization and Layout
Procedural Level Greybox using Unreal Landscape and Spline Tools
Successfully incorporated the Game mechanic "Mic Input to Walk" and Iterated on the level to Strategically place 15 Cat Shrines for random Shrine generation, increasing Level's Replayability and creating an Immersive Experience
Landscape Material, Foliage Optimization to achieve consistent fps
Designing Narrative Features to compliment & enhance the horror theme
Modeling & Texturing custom assets like House, bridge, Fences.
Set Dressing and Final Look Development of the level

Workflow

Since our game was about cats and a deceased cat mother (Momo), I began looking at cat pictures for inspiration. I started looking for silhouettes when I came across this:

Taking this and other references of sitting cats, I sketched this out quickly.

The player would begin at the tail and work their way up to the head (House), collecting shrines along the route. All of the shrines were built around the joints of a sitting cat, with the front legs being an elevated platform.

I began with a flat terrain (505x505) and using the sketch above, started blocking out the level boundary with landscape splines, carving a playable area first and then adding more splines to break up the level. This is what we had for an early prototype.

Keeping level design factors and block mesh Guidance Principles (GDC talk by David Shaver) in mind, I designed the level such that the player always had one shrine in their view. This was accomplished by either raising the terrain or strategically positioning them, with one shrine serving as a way point (breadcrumbs) for the next.

I iterated on the level more, improving its flow and changing the trees to match the aesthetic we were going for. Added a fence that ran around the level using blueprint and splines. I added a few additional shrine sites across the map to keep the game replayable, and the shrines were created randomly at the start of the game. There were around 11 shrine sites and 7 shrines. A few images of the level's final layout.

Final Lighting and Gameplay screenshots:

Roles/Credits

Shubham Beri (Level Designer, Set Dressing, Environment/Character Artist) Arnav Sanghavi (Programmer)

Arjun Kapoor (Programmer, Game Logic, Microphone Mechanic) Oguz Bicer (Game Design, Project Manager, Audio, UI) Moulya Paramesh (Lighting, Prop Artist)