SCOTT DAVID GARSON - GAME / NARRATIVE DESIGNER & UNREAL DEVELOPER

Elusive Prey

Overview

Elusive Prey is a prototype of Shadows & Echoes' deep memory recall mechanic where the Soul Fetcher Eledrith dar Umbra enters a character's memories to relieve events in vivid detail.

In this scenario, you play as the Beast of Blackwood as they seek to rid its home of the traps laid by hunters.

This is a medium-fidelity prototype that leverages asset packages from the Unreal Marketplace and Kitbash Cargo, as well as some assets that I had created in Blender.

Gameplay mechanics

The player's main objective is to destroy all of the traps. As they explore the forest, they will trigger story points that will play a short narration. The narration is in second-person past tense, indicating that the narrator, Eledrith, is helping the Beast recall their memorites, and revealing hints about past events.

The Beast can use its senses to highlight important areas in the environment as they prowl the forest.

My roles

Game Designer
Narrative Designer
3D Modeler
Level Designer

Stack

Unreal Engine
Blender
Eleven Labs
Adobe Audition

Downloads

Trap Mechanic

Hunters have strewn steel traps about the forest. In terms of level design, the traps are laid out in such a way as to lead the player on a tour of the forest environment, hitting the various narrated story points.

The objective of the game is to destroy all of the traps that are strewn about the forest.

I modeled the traps in Blender and textured them in Unreal.

Mechanically, the traps have three states: Armed, Tripped, and Destroyed.

Armed

When armed, the trap is open and ready to catch the victim. The trap itself as three zones.

The Trigger Zone will snap the trap shut. The player will take damage over time until they move out of the Danger Zone and into the Safe Zone, where they have freed themselves from the trap.

Tripped

Traps that have been tripped display the jaws in the closed state. If the trap's initial state is tripped, the Trigger and Danger zones are deactivated (the player will not take damage). If the trap was tripped by the player entering the Trigger Zone, they they will take damage until they either destroy the trap, or move out of the Danger Zone into the Safe Zone.

Destroyed

In this state, the trap dispays a "broken" state, and the damage over time effect, if appied, stops. The Trigger and Danger zones are disabled. From a story perspective, destroyed traps cannot be reset by hunters.

Encapsulation & Organization

To keep things organized and readable, I encapsulated the various pieces of functionality of the traps into separate functions.

I created a function for animating the trap closed that was fed by a timeline.

Story Points

Story points are distributed around the forest to tell the story of the Beast of Blackwood's memories, and provide hints to other past events.

When triggered, the story points call a Narrator actor that handles fading out previous audio and playing the new one.

Elusive Prey was my first Unreal project and I was getting used to working with the engine and blueprints. As such, I took a simple approach to configuring the story point by setting the sound file and subtitles directly on the story point instance itself. In future projects, I leveraged data tables and data assets.

Predator's Senses

I wanted the Beast of Blackwood to have special senses that would help it navigate the forest and highlight points of interest. To represent this, I placed spotlights above various areas and the traps that are triggered when the player presses the F key.

I didn't want the player to just hold down the F key indefinitely, however, so I added a mechanic where the player's movement is slowed while the senses are activated.

When the senses are activated, a growling audio cue plays. The growling sound was generated by Eleven Labs' text-to-sound generator, and adjusted in Adobe Audition.

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