Game design
a. Initial concept
To showcase what changed and what remained the same during the conception, here are the slides I made for the initial pitch of Yurei.
b. How we built the vision
The core of the pitch and its mechanic mostly stayed the same. Most of the change were in terms of narrative, as I wanted to build the story with the team and only created a simple context to support the pitch. Since it's a pretty narrative-oriented game I wanted to give as much freedom as possible to the narrative designers, while I was handling the gameplay and level design.
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, you will meet dead ends or see the story take a wrong turn.
To progress you need to alter the story by skimming through the pages and replaying them differently
We later refined the experience on our side. (Me and the two other game designers)
To define these core pillars & the overall story we made multiple meeting with the team, to make sure everyone voice was heard. We produced brainstorm documents that later served us as support for refining the vision.
Story & game themes brainstorming document
made with the team
We made multiple back & forth with the team, each time presenting our work to them, acting as a synthesis of our previous brainstorms. We made multiple presentations, on the levers, on the game story, and on it's core mechanics.
c. Core features
Yurei always has been about 3 main gameplay features, here is how they were designed :
The first feature we tested with a protoype from our programmers, with it I've been able to set up
panels and camera to iterate on the 3C, navigation and mise en scene.
Ink was first thought as a resource used to turn the pages, and similar to a health bar, causing a game over if you had no more. But it asked us multiple questions :
Wouldn't tying turning pages to a resource be frustrating ?
Would making puzzle based of this kind of resource management be fun?
3C
Interaction
Puzzle
Movement
Movement
Interaction
Puzzle
Resource
Our key-selling feature, being able to turn the pages and replay them to alter the story. It asked us a lot of design questions like :
Can you skip pages ?
Can you restart in any panels ?
Is turning pages limited by a resource (ink) ?
We playtested if player felt lost with the camera change or had trouble with the controls, and indeed our system was pretty rough at first so we iterated until we got something that felt great, mainly by tweaking control interpolations and the transitions between the cameras.
I also decided to remove the possibility for the character to go back in previous panels without turning the pages and replaying them, since we were still hesitating at that point.
Removing it make our main mechanic (turning the pages) more useful and less gimmicky.
To answer thoses questions I first tested a lot of possibilities using sketches and a paper prototype, with a dice to take count of the player's amount of ink. Then we went to playtests.
Based on the resuts and scope of the project I decided that you could only go to a future page if you had already explored it, skipping pages would have induced a very complex non-linear narrative and level design and with the time we had it would have been hard to set it up efficiently.
Based on the resuts I decided to change how the ink worked, as it was indeed frustrating.
Now the ink is a special resource, no longer linked to health nor used to turn the pages but to draw incomplete sketches left by Jun in their past, allowing to alter the story & access new areas.
To make those changes known to the team I made a full presentation that you can find here :
The core features in game
Moving inside panels
During all the vertical slice Jun moves inside panels, they cannot go back except if they enter navigation mode.
All panels are actually in 3D with the environment being drawn on top of the blockout.
Navigating between pages
& replaying them
Navigation mode is introduced early in the vertical slice, Jun gets stuck in a dark room with no way to go back. The player need to turn the pages to go to a previous page and take another path to progress further.
First puzzle
Using ink to draw incomplete sketches
In the vertical slice ink is used to unlock a pathway to escape from the central plaza. The ink is obtained after dying inside the pit and absorbing your own blood to use as ink.
Second puzzle
d. Related documentation
Player verbs
Core gameplay
e. Beat chart
Yurei vertical slice was built with three major beats in mind.
Exploration
Exploring the city getting a look at it's grandiose yet eerie ambiance.
Puzzle
Making the player use the navigation between pages & ink to progress
Chase
End with a climatic final where the creature is chasing Jun
The goal was to increase the tension progressively and end up on a climatic finale.
Here is a more detailled beat chart with tension curve I made for the team :
f. To go further
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.
-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:
-Better communication with each field.
-Better knowledge of the constraints of each field.
Level design
a.Pillars & constraints
In Yūrei, level design has two layers, it both refers to what’s played inside the panels, and the overall page composition as well. I thought the level design following those pillars & constraints:
Manga layout
The challenge was to think about something coherent in terms of traversal but also in terms of layout & mise en scène, to truly immerse the player inside the manga.
Sense of scale & great scenery
Having Blame as one of our main inspirations we wanted a great focus on the environment and making the player feel small, while alternating with more intimate close shots to be transported in Jun’s psyche.
Know when to break the rules
Since the manga is haunted we want to surprise the player, and that’s also true in terms of level design, using a variety of effects, like a seemingly infinite panel, moving the camera when its normally always fixed etc...
A well balanced labyrinth
The manga acts as a labyrinth, the player should feel lost and try to understand what to change to progress in the story. However the reflexive and more tense moments are clearly separated to avoid a confusing rhythm.
A quick example of how it manifests in our vertical slice chapter :
The level starts with a labyrinthic
exploration phase, losing the player in a complex layout with grand set pieces.
It ends with a tense chase scene, where the fixed cameras start to move to surprise the player.
b. Level design sketches & paper prototype
To achieve this I first started with a bunch of prototypes related to the navigation system and the kind of puzzles we could make around it, as both of these things will heavily impact the structure of the level.
c. Testing movement & panels
Then I worked directly in engine, first to build a testing area that would serve for the in-game navigation prototype, using the panels & camera systems made by our programmers.
d. Vertical slice level storyboard
Based on the beat chart I made, the narrative designers, visual artists and I made a storyboard of the whole level. This document became our main reference document for the rest of the production, as both designer, visual artist & sound designers were able to add annotion to the different pages.
e. Building the level
Yurei level design is mostly linear, with some back and forth to progress and unlock new paths, by replaying the pages differently. The process used for building the level was to base myself of the previously made storyboard to create the blockout and then iterate by testing and getting feedbacks. Then when the blockout was validated our visual artists could draw on top of it.
f. Vertical slice level walkthrough