Slum77 is my final year school project. We developped the game all throughout the year, with a team of 7 people.
It is a 2-player horror game, where players embody prisoners in an workstation invaded by deadly creatures. Without any means of defense and no way to communicate with each other, they will have to survive and find a way out of the station.
This game was the most challenging I had to work on. Because there was a major design constraint we had to deal with, that makes this game original: making a horror game that works with cooperation. How can we scare the players in a context where they can reassure each other?
To achieve this, we decided to push our intentions as far as we could, and to stay true to them, by preventing players from communicating directly. We introduced a marking system, which helps them to work together on certain tasks and that can bring emergent communication, but that's all. In that way, players would feel isolated even together, and a well timed separation of the players would make them feel totally abandoned. The separation of the player was a strong lever, but was very challenging in terms of level design. Indeed, we really wanted to avoid the situation where on player waits for the other for too long. So we introduced bottlenecks, where the players need to be together to go forward, and the possibility for one player to help the other if he's stuck.
This project was also a big challenge production wise. It was the first time I had to manage a long term project like this, and the ambition of the project required to make difficult decisions regarding the scope. This really was the kind of project that could have sunk at any time, but the whole team was involved in making the decisions, and we are now very happy of the final result. The game was praised by the jury for its ambition and its realization, and it is the game I am the most proud of today.
Erwann Depaeuw : Game Designer & Level Designer
Maxime Conquy : Environment Artist & Level Artist
Anaïs Diquet : Environment Artist & Level Artist
Deepak Joshi : Character Artist & Environment Artist
Thibaut Monnet : Gameplay Programmer - Sound Designer
David Bourel : Gameplay Programmer - AI Programmer
| Roles | Producing - Game design - Level design - Sound design |
| Genre | Coop horror game |
| Engine | Unreal Engine 4 |
