PSYCHOLOGICAL-HORROR
NARRATIVE-DRIVEN
SOLO
2D/3D
MANGA
⏱️ 5 months
👥 Team of 10
⚙️Unity
Yūrei is the vertical slice of a psychological horror game set in a manga's haunted pages. You play as Jun, a mangaka who was absorbed by their own book and forced to continue the story. It's up to you to fight your past demons, rewrite the narrative, and break the curse.
🙋♂️ What I did:
-Original game concept.
-Overall game systems, how the manga work, how you skim through the pages etc...
-Designing puzzles, mostly for the full-game.
-Level design of the vertical-slice, in close collaboration with the environement artist & narrative-designer.
-Participation to the narrative-design.
-Visual assets integration.
📝 What i've learned:
-Communicate even better with the different specialty.
-Better use of the unity animation system
Game design
a. Vision
Yurei early concept stemmed from wanting to pay an homage to both horror manga and early survival-horror games that use a fixed-angle camera; a core idea that stayed with us during all the production. As a game designer I always try to follow a clear vision, to achieve it we set up three core pillars :
Panels & pages as game spaces.
Follow the rules of manga composition, reading order, speech bubbles, onomatopiea etc...
Tied to the horror aspect of the game, Jun is vulnerable, tortured by an entity that reshape their world.
Twisting established codes to create a mix of dread and curiosity.
Tied to the puzzle aspect of the game, you will frequently meet dead ends or see the story take a wrong turn.
In order to progress you will have to alter the story by skimming through the pages and replaying them differently
b. Core loop
c. Live presentation to professionals
Level design
In Yūrei their are two layers to the level design, the one inside the panels and the overall pages layout.
Right now I'm mostly iterating on gym levels & puzzle sections, soon the narrative designers will give me a brief that will allow me to build the main level of the vertical slice.
a. Level design drawing & paper prototype
b. Gym level & early panel test
c. Making levels for the Vertical slice
d. Vertical slice level walkthrough