House Escape Puzzle Game
Olga Puksberg, Nadiia Zaiachkovska, Liisa Leit
Project description
The project's main idea is to create an escape puzzle game where the user can explore the haunted house from the first point of view and solve hidden puzzles to escape the house. During the gameplay, the user learns the history behind the house and helps the house's ghost's soul find peace.
Demo
Repository
https://github.com/LiisaLeit/Exploration-Puzzle-Game
Build
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14sl_zu2RkUCiX9332F3h2N2bVUnAhGog?usp=sharing
Tools
To create this project, we used Blender for house modeling and Godot for implementing the gameplay.
Initial progress (14.11.2023)
At this project stage, we decided on the final result of our project and created a pretty detailed plan of what would occur in the game.
PLOT
We have already planned the puzzle sequence and decided on the plot. The game's main plot is that the main character is trapped in the house because of the ghost of a woman whose soul can not find peace until someone hears her life story. At the beginning of the game, the player stands in the hallway and has access to a few other rooms while others are locked. During the game, the player solves different puzzles to find keys from the locked doors and get the pieces of a letter written by the woman whose ghost is now haunting the house. After all the letter pieces are found, the woman's soul becomes free.
You can see the text of the letter on our repository page.
HOUSE MODEL
For the first stage, we have an initial Blender model of the house with initial textures. The model does not have furniture and doors yet - these elements will be added at the following stages of the project.
First model:
GODOT
We have imported the house model into Godot and implemented a door opening/closing. We have also added a player with a first-person perspective who can move around the house.
You can check the initial implementation by downloading and unpackaging application.zip from our repository. After that, run the GodotEngine application. Details about how to move and interact with objects are written in the application's main menu. Please note that to interact with a key and doors, you need to be quite close to them.
Final release (21.01.2024)
HOUSE MODEL
For the final house model we added all the furniture, windows, doors and for the outside we added a wall limiting the players movements and the view of the border of the playable world.
Final model:
Here's the 1st and 2nd floor layout with all the furniture:
We also created a lot of objects to show the wear and tear of the house and make it look abandoned. Such as broken objects, trash and disorganized placement of furniture. We placed cobwebs around the house using a free cobweb generator made by VICUBE Animation:
To make the model textures and their surfaces more realistic looking, we used some metallic, roughness and normal material maps. Here are some pictures of materials with and without roughness maps:
Rooms:
GODOT
For final version of the game we imported all the new models into the house. Gradually we added riddles, 4 in total. In the next step, we added hints that appear when player interacts with certain objects. Those show up as text and should help find solutions to puzzles. Also we added our story in the form of diary pages. Finally we added sounds and lighting to emphasize the atmosphere.
Below are some images of the game during the development process.
From left to right: first version, setting up lighting without the models, final project.
Conclusions & Possible Improvements
The main aim of our project was accomplished. At the end of the project, we have an executable app where the player can engage with the house's environment. All planned puzzles are implemented, and the player can finish the game by solving all of them and discovering the story of the house's past inhabitants.
The aim of the project is completed, nevertheless, some difficulties with gameplay occur, which could have been improved in future releases. For example, the movements in the game aren't as smooth as we'd like them to be on regular laptops (everything works well on lab PCs). There are some areas of the house where they work well, but there are also some where the movements of a character are quite rapid and hard to follow. We connect this problem to the model and app sizes, and maybe this could be somehow optimized in future versions.
During the mini-testings, we found that people find it hard to understand how to solve the piano riddle correctly. This might be improved in the next releases by changing the clues for the puzzle so players can better understand the task. Here's the solution to the piano riddle.
We also found some minor problems in the gameplay that can be improved by additional clues or minimal changes in the game flow. In the late stage, we found out that the player could get out of the living room without getting the kitchen key from the piano, and all the doors in the house would be locked (the same could happen with the kitchen riddle as well). After this, the player had to start the game from the beginning. This was solved by adding the condition that the doors don't close until the keys are picked.
The last issue that we found late and weren't able to fix was a problem with some objects in the game - instead of being textured, they were completely black. At first, we thought there was something wrong with the Materials' settings, but there was a problem with lighting. The objects were shadowed for some reason, and we couldn't have fixed that due to the lack of time.
Even though we spotted some mistakes in the gameplay and the model, this project was a great learning experience and gave us some insight that we'll keep in mind during our next projects.