Back during the Fall of 2015, I was still enrolling to Computer Simulation for Gaming courses at "Milwaukee technical College" and was learning at a great pace till one day my instructor who specializes in Animation decided to divide the class into two teams in order to create a group project. Our instructor was Seth Swanson well known to be professional Animator whom I did learn about that he was one of the members that help out create DeadSpace 3 game.
Once I learn and verified his claim of being involved in creating this awesome survival horror game I literally "sweat-drop" knowing that not only this world is severely small but also the fact this is the same guy who given me a letter C grade for animation class known as
"Principles of 3D Animation" which you can see down here.
Anyway enough glory talk about my old instructor, let's discuss what went down that lead to creation of "EscapeOrDie"
Link: https://gamejolt.com/games/escapeordie/184964
Story (Brief)
The story of a woman who is stuck in a dark basement. Trapped, she tries to find a way out. Using her environment she has many options to escape before the killer catches her.
Story (Detailed)
Starting with an appointment with a psychiatric, she witnesses the killing of the psychiatric. Blacking out, she wakes up in the basement of a building not knowing what happened. Trapped she has to find an exit before the killer comes to kill her. Using her environment she has to open other rooms and retrieve other tools to help her escape. Throughout her escape, she finds newspapers and documents explaining the killer's patterns, who they target, and psychologic documents of patients. If she doesn’t escape in time the killer will catch her a hang her by the neck with a chain. If she escapes, she will find out that she is actually the killer herself. She is actually insane and she is the killer. The room is actually the player's state of mind.
My team was composed of 10 members where each person either perform as Artist, Animator, Writer, Programmer, Sound designer, and lastly Level Designer.
As a level designer, some of my responsibilities were to design out the layout of the game that would be fun to engage with, collaborate with every member of the team going from artists all the way to programmers just to polish the game, and technically help maintained the entire build with one of the programmers.
After the drawn map layout was produced, Mary and Angela have worked together to create the gray box version of the entire level just to see which direction we shall take. As time passed on, I have given couple tasks to Angela that mostly involved with creating game props that some will be interactive while others are just for background aesthetics. Throughout the 3 months worth of trials lead to success and failures, the entire level itself has grown from a simple idea to paper to gray-box and all the way to final design.
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Once we finally cook this survival horror demo, it was portrayed at school event known as portfolio event though there was overall technical difficulty with auditorium speakers which has denied the sound effects of our game to reach to ears of our audience. Despite that aesthetic impediment, everyone clearly signs of joy and cheers about how interesting this small game really was and their reaction was based on visual of our demo alone. Though I was happy to know that this game project was a success but I still wished the speakers were operational so the audience would have the pleasure to hear all the pain and suffering the main character have to endure with the game.
If anyone here wants to try out this survival horror demo then you can get it free at Game Jolt:
https://gamejolt.com/games/escapeordie/184964
Thanks for reading this post.