YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 1 - Finished Hallway

The hallway starts with a 20 second elevator ride. I wanted to create the impression that the hallway was in a remote location so I imply that the player is far from ground level. This also gives the player time to get a feel for the controls and most players will try to click the buttons during this time because they have nothing else to do. Although the buttons have no function, they do react to the player clicking on them. I did this to teach the player early on that they can click on things in the game because it's an important function used later on.

The first thing the player sees when the elevator doors open is basically pitch black. The lighting from the elevator shines out onto the walls to let the player know that they only need to walk forwards. I intentionally left a fairly large gap between the elevator floor and the ground because I want the player to feel uneasy walking over this gap and into the dark hallway.

The window with bricks is a nod to David Lynch's Eraserhead and I use it few quite a few things. Firstly it acts as a visual marker in the pitch black to allow the player to judge their bearings. It also acts as a dim light source which can only be seen from the blue room causing an inconsistency in the players mind as well as making the hallway more visually interesting the second time through. It's also intended to make players uneasy (especially ones with a history of horror game), since it's a space where something could jump out at you when your back is turned. Many players walk backwards away from the wall. Finally, I was hoping the absurdity of a window leading directly to a wall should put the players on edge. A bit like how the hallways don't link together in a reasonable way in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

There's a piano (downloaded a royalty free model) in the hallway that is a major set piece and requires interacting with to progress. To make this clear I've raised it up to bring more attention to it. I also try to teach the player that they can interact with things by making the buttons in the elevator pressable in the long sequence in the beginning. I've tested the game with 2 different people who don't normally press games and both of them have figured out fairly quickly that they can interact with the piano.

After touching the piano the door previous swings open. I was considering adding a swinging sound effect but because of the obvious light difference every one has noticed fairly quickly. I made sure the door opened in such a way that it didn't obscure the players view of the light from the blue room.

This door leads to the second part of the hallway which has another major color change. Once the player is inside, the door swings shut and piano music starts to play (Funeral March, Op. posth. 72). Because the player already knows where the piano is, this music gives them the goal of finding the piano again to find out who is playing it.

This part of the hallway has a very dark section and I've hidden a trigger box in it that teleports the player into the dark part of the other bit of the corridor. This allows the player to escape the room whilst playing with their sense of geography.

When the player gets back to the piano the elevator opens again allowing them to leave. I give the player the choice of messing with the piano a second time for a bit of an 'alternate ending'.

Given that the player has no other direction to go in here, they eventually find themselves back at the open elevator where I restart the level.

Throughout the hallway I'm trying to imply some kind of narrative about this huge man and possibly some kind of water related death but honestly that just sort of developed as I was making the hallway and was not planned from the beginning.

YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 1 - Level Design

I've been thinking about what to do regarding audio for the hallway and I've been collecting audio from freesound.org. I've also been recording my own audio.
I've made the players walking speed a fairly realistic slow walking pace because I can use it to create tension as well as making the player feel more in the characters shoes so to speak. I've also recorded a stepping noise and used variations on the noise to create real sounding stepping sounds for the same reason. I also intend to fake out the player by creating stepping noises from around corners etc
Another reason for the stepping sounds is to subtly cause the player to pay more attention to the audio, since I'm intending to use it a lot for guiding/ scaring the player.

I watched a GDC talk recently by Brendon Chung on Youtube recently called How to Tell Stories and Guide Players through Level Design and he talks about using things like buttons to force the player to look in a certain direction so you can do things behind their back, so I've included the ability to interact with certain objects in the scene so I can put this to use.
He also talks about making the geometry easily readable by putting bends at the ends of corridors and not hiding important passage ways behind sharp corners. However, since part of this project is about disorienting the player (whilst still guiding them through a space) I actually have hidden a passageway around a corner in the dark because I don't necessarily want the player to notice it on their first time walking past.
I do use light at the end of a hallway trick though because I DO want to guide the players in that direction.

YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 1 - Theme

I'm only intending to grey-box the hallway for this project with basic textures for the walls but I still feel like it's important that I have some kind of theme or if this hotel is set in the real world, a decade. The reason for this is because the theme determines so much about the layout of the hallway, the context for why the player is there, and the visual and audio ques I can use.

considering this hallway is a place once lived in it's tempting to go for the 1920's, given how lively everything was back then and the jazz/ swing music of the time elicits a feeling of age. My biggest concern is how cliche it might seem given how popular that time period is in current media (Fallout, Bioshock, etc).

One route might be to set the game in the future and have 'the past' as the current day. Perhaps I can reveal this in some kind of twist ending.

Here are some pictures of atmoshperic hallways I collated. Generally speaking the more lavish looking hotels seem to have wider hallways, more use of reds, carpets, seating and wall mounted pictures. The more 'atmospheric' looking hallways seem to generally have mostly unnatural light, generally darker 'mood' lighting and lots of variation in width, where small passages lead off to more doors etc.

YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 1

By their very nature, hotels are designed to teem with life but

when business dips and owners can no longer afford to keep the

doors open, the building’s inviting atmosphere dissipates.

Lobbies once choked with people become yawning and shadowy.

Wandering down hallways with darkened rooms flanking either

side becomes an exercise in courage. In these places, the mind

plays tricks, inventing footfalls, laughter, and snippets of music

from a bygone age

- or perhaps some guests really do never

leave. 

My first task of the year is to create an atmospheric hallway with this description. As a games designer/ indie developer my goal is to make what is essentially quite a small area into something interesting to traverse despite limited traversal options. To do that I'll be guiding the player using audio, lighting, level geometry, and I'll be looking for interesting ways to reuse the same space. Where possible I'll be using lots of tricks to keep the player on their toes and to imply some kind of narrative.

Thematically I liked the idea of the 'infinite hotel' also known as 'Hilbert's Paradox of the Grand Hotel', which is an infinitely large fictional hotel used as an aid in describing the notion of infinity. I figured a hotel of infinite size would have it's own ecosystem, transport, leisurely spaces and due to it's infinite size would also contain entire fields, cities, continents, and planets. Which is why I think I've concluded that it's actually quite a bad theme for this hotel; it has no direction.

But I do like the idea of an impossibility space. Corridors that link back to themselves, architecture that makes no real sense, walls that shift and change shape. It also got me thinking about a game called Bernband by Indie developer Tom Van Den Boogart. A large part of this project is the atmosphere and in Bernband, the real atmosphere comes from the feeling of existing in a real world. The Bars scattered around, the sound of people making their daily commutes, and the quiet spaces away from all the noise.


For my hallway I can't have people walking around as it goes directly against the brief, but I can certainly trick the player by playing audio of what once was there, and make them feel like they're living in a real space by building it as if people really did live here.

Here are a few initial ideas:

Audio:
Footsteps that mimic yours
Music from within other rooms
Traffic from outside
voices that mock the player
Scuttling sounds

Echo, reverb?

Visual:
Dim the lights
Put the lights out
Change the time of day
Fake flooring/ walls

Ludic:
Change the players height
change the players speed
Loop the hallway back into itself
Change things behind the players back

Thematically I'm still a little bit stuck and I'll cover that in the next blog post.