Software Used
Production from September 2019 - December 2019
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The Theme
BlackHill Cemetery takes place in personal purgatory for a Victorian Doctor that allowed his greed to dictate his life. In this cemetery the doctor is faced with the sins he committed in life; those that he had wrong have come to torture him in the form of Apparitions roaming the cemetery.
The Apparitions
As each Apparition is directly tied to a person connected to the doctor, the player can learn more about them and the doctor through objects and memories scattered throughout the cemetery.
How to Play
Each night the player is to venture into the cemetery to uncover a memory. Memories are found a top the active sin, or a target grave, once found the player can continue to the next night. However, as they travel around they must avoid being confronted by the Apparitions or else their night will repeat.
The Map
Originally our map was very regimented however it did not reflect the well put together chaos of a true Victorian graveyard that was built and expanded on over time. In order to make the world space feel like a Victorian graveyard I had created smaller subsets and key feature areas listed in this map in order make this graveyard mimic that chaos of its real world counterpart. These areas also served to help the player know where they were in relation to the world s as it was rather large and these areas were built to be distinctive.
The Team
- Systems Designer - Robert Price: https://www.robertbrianprice.com/
- Producer - Micheal Paul Ho Kang Yo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mphky
- Programmer - Micheal Zheng: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelzheng-gp
- Artist - Celina Tong: https://www.artstation.com/crtong
- Product Owner, Level, and Narrative Designer - Myself
Developing the Narrative
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The Beginning
The first iteration of this narrative featured a more aggressive tone to the game. It was rather generic and involved cults and rituals the player was unfortunate enough to stumble into. This was accompanied by a much smaller map with the main focal point being a summoning circle and the sounds featured were to unnerve and attack the player.
The First Iteration
When we chose the Victorian theme for our game the narrative started to evolve, we still wanted our player to be a living character but we wanted more substance to what they encountered. I wanted to draw on the spiritualism of the Victorian Era and how now most of what they perceived to be as ghosts has been debunked. My jumping point was seances so I wanted something that felt very real but ultimately was not there. It was also this that shifted the player to only being able to interact with the graves and none of the Apparitions.
The Second Iteration
We quickly realized the route we were going for didn't have a conclusion and so it was back to the drawing board. During one of our meeting the idea of Purgatory was brought up. This is where the story board to the left came from. This was the complete story if the game was ever brought to completion. It continues with our Victorian theme but instead of our playing character being living he was stuck.
With some liberties on what Purgatory is, I decided our player was a doctor and at this point we had two AI enemies we needed to contextualize. I made the AI people our doctor wronged while he was living. During this iteration they were the souls of those people that are stuck in purgatory with him and they purpose was to punish him and allow them their own revenge.
The Third Iteration
The major change this time was the Apparitions were no longer the souls of the people he wronged but rather his subconscious manifesting all his sins in a physical form. This allowed us to use the AI more often and develop an end goal. Now our player would discover a piece of themselves every night. We wanted this narrative to be slowly introduced and we wanted the player to discover their character was dead at the same rate the character in the story did.
We did this by making the grave they needed to dig up a memory, this also contextualized each grave as a sin the doctor committed. This meant each objective grave of the night was a sin he needed to dig up in order to learn about himself and his impact on others. Once the doctor had come to terms with the ramifications of his actions and understand his sins could he move on.
We wanted to create an end in which the player could be the ultimate judge of the doctor and send him to heaven or doom him to hell. We never got to that point in planning as our production cycle was rather quick but it was something we wanted to explore before we had to move on from this project.