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Dying Light Level -
"The Haunted Place"

    The “The Haunted Place” is a single-player level designed for Dying Light, and the estimated gameplay time is 10 minutes. This level includes one main quest “Nightmare” and one side quest “Secret Chamber”. The level environment includes both interior and exterior to fit the horror theme. There are a few moving objects and scary teddy bears as jump scare. 

Link:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2891386156

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Video
Gallery
Goals

Design Goals

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​Dying Light is a cool survival horror which allows me to create more unique horror gameplay. I built the environment with a lot of blood and dead bodies. The overall feeling is quiet and despair. Players will hear some horror sound effects and feel more engaged with some jump scare. 

1. Build unique horror scene in Dying Light

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2. Control level pacing and combat balance

​There are two quests in the level for players to finish. Both of them require players to explore the basement and museum area. Other than exploration, players need to find quest items in order to finish the quest and back to NPC. There are many zombies spread throughout the level and their combat wave and difficulty are carefully adjusted. 

Postmortem

Postmortem

  • What Went Well:  

    • Level design with interior and exterior space

      • ​The overall level layout fits the theme I want and pretty similar to Dying Light game environment. I utilized scripting and movies to create a lot of quest events to increase the fun of gameplay.

    • Overall Horror feels and lighting setup

      • ​I tried to add some greyish lighting with smoke effects to reduce players' vision but still allow them to see the environment without a flashlight. With the help of ambiance music and special talking teddy bears, it is easy to enhance the horror theme.

    • Level flow and enemy placement

      • I only gave players melee weapons so that they could not hide or stealth from enemies. Also, players will not be chased by zombies if they aren't capable of killing them all. Some of them only appear as scary elements in dark environments so that no players feel overwhelmed by them. 

  • What Went Wrong:  

    • Lack of exterior verticality design

      • The exterior combat is very simple because of my overall setting. I don't want players to fight hardly in a beautiful town. Therefore I didn't create height differences to help them engage in combat.​

    • Jump scare moments not efficient every time

      • Due to the limitation of the developer tools, I can not lock on player's camera to force them to see every jump scare. If they accidentally move their mouse real quick they might just miss the surprise.​

    • Need more sound effects and ambiance music to support the horror scene

      • It is hard to customize the ambiance music in Dying Light so that all the music is the game's default setting. If possible, I definitely will lower the ambiance music and make the environment quieter with only a few special sound effects.​

  • What I Learned:

    • It is not easy to make a horror level that can scare everyone

      • It was my first time making a horror theme level with combat, and I did much research, and watch a lot of gameplay videos to learn tricks about how to surprise players. Some players might not be scared by common horror elements so their gaming experience will be boring if they don't enjoy killing zombies. 

      • A lot of horror games only give players limited resources and weak weapons to force players to hide and run away from enemies. 

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