Psychological terror experience with photorealistic models and illumination

Abstract

This Project contain the design and development of a realistic 3D experience with the main goal of transmit fear, loneliness and suspense to the player. This experience is based on a realistic environment and characters to increase the amount of immersion. Then to improve the atmosphere of the game it is added sounds, realistic real-time illumination and shadows. This project is mainly focused on the artistic part of a videogame, specifically 3D. The main objective of this game is to create a realistic environment formed by models and character completely credible. To transmit feelings to a player, such fear, it is so much easier with a photorealistic environment. The second objective of this project is to create a realistic and unique story, with survival horror and conspiracies elements. The third objective of this experience is to create puzzles in the game, making a challenge for those who wants to finish it. The game is a big loop, each loop has iterations, and in each iteration, the history is dosed and distributed around the environment, by notes. This notes will be in some places of the environment; the user has to read them to continue the loop. The history will be told by some elements like a TV, a phone or even voices in his head. Also there some important part of the history that will be told by the pictures in the walls, those pictures has to be found first, and they will be hide around the environment. Meanwhile the player tries to find and understand it, it will be haunt by a character. The game has been made in four steps, brainstorming, artistic elements creation, scripting, effects and testing. The first step, brainstorming, thinking how to orientate and create the history, the environment, the gameplay and the game cycle. To create the history was necessary just two words, then it was constructed around that. What took more time was the structure of the environment because the main objective was to get visual impact and it took some sketches to get the final result. The second step was the creation of artistic elements; this phase was the one that took more time to develop. The environment is plenty of assets, this go through different processes (concept, modeling, texturizing, animation and implementation) it takes time to develop just an asset. The third step is the scripting process. The main objective of this experience is to get visual impact and easy gameplay. This step was not the main objective of the game even though this process was one that took more time because there are some tricky mechanics in the game. The four step is testing and image-effects and post production. When something was done, it was necessary to test it and check if everything done last and before was working properly, if not it was fundamental to check where the bug is, debug and test again. In this process it was added all the post production effects to the camera, it has to be modified all the values of the post processing script to get the right visual effect for the experience.