Vaettir Is a collection horror game with some minor survival elements. Our main inspirations were the Slender man game and alien: isolation. The story is about a medicine woman who hallucinates various supernatural entities due to leaking volcanic gas coming from underneath a village which was struck by an earthquake. The theme for this game project was natural phenomena and we included this by portraying natural phenomena through the lens of someone who is superstitious and influenced by the beliefs of their time period which makes them see things that are not really there. For example the in game story objectives are based on will-o’-wisps which are a real phenomenon which has had mythological connotations throughout the past.

The gameplay consists of the player exploring and searching for wisps spread around the map and collecting them. To find wisps the player can use their lantern which will flicker and shrink its light cone when looking at a wisp in range. Meanwhile, the player is constantly being hunted by a huge monster which uses inverse kinematics to animate its limbs which gives it a very unsettling feel. At the same time the player’s sanity is constantly being drained and they must replenish it by finding and consuming herbs spread across the map. If the player’s sanity is very low they will be hunted mercilessly and various effects will distort their vision. As the player collects wisps the game will also become more and more dark which makes player rely more on their lantern to find their way around and makes the game scarier. When the player has collected a required amount of wisps they will be led towards the top of a mountain overlooking the village and there the game ends. 

My main responsibilities during this project were working with various systems. I made a entire inventory system which could track 3 different resources for the player but unfortunately it had to be scrapped before completion because of time constraints and gameplay related issues. Most of the UI outside of the art itself I worked on as well as earlier versions of the tutorial. I participated in making the inverse kinematics system early on to get the basics working. I also helped implement the event system which plays paranormal events randomly and triggers chase sequences at pre-determined points. Outside of system implementation I also had a small hand in some of the level design as well as helping other people in my team with unreal engine problems.