The Quiet Place - Work in progress
Overview
The Quiet Place is an exploration adventure game, wherein players control different animals to solve environment puzzles.
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After losing their memory, the player falls down into the mysterious halfway world and must navigate through a strange and compelling landscape to recover their identity in order to get back home. Meet creatures neither man nor beast, adult or child, friend or foe, on a journey through a place lost in time.
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The Quiet Place Visual Development
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TOOLS:
Unity, C#
LENGTH:
4 Weeks
GENRE:
Atmospheric Fantasy
Exploration-Adventure
Game Design & Prototype
My main goal for the prototype was to identify animals that fit the environment, were fun to play, and had unique and distinctive abilities. I also wanted to encourage interaction across animals so that if the player performed an action as one animal, it would unlock something for another animal to do.
The first thing I prototyped was switching between animals and the player. Each controllable unit has a trigger volume & display icon. If the player enters the volume & presses E, the Cinemachine camera transfers to the new unit and enables the new controller script. In the first iteration, I used a mouse raycast to detect and display switching and a text prompt to tell players how to switch. Using a raycast meant that if players hovered over the animal too far or didn't hover when close, it wasn't obvious how to switch. Using a trigger volume was a more organic way to activate the interaction display and freed up the mouse to be used for future camera control. The text prompt was hard to read and become redundant to read over and over again, so I replaced it with a simple button icon.
Visual Development
This project started out as a narrative and visual design project where I created character designs, in-game documents, promotional materials, and a fictional studio to publish the game. The goal of this project was to create the necessary visual and story elements to pitch the game to potential investors.
Studio Logo
For this project, I began by creating a game studio and developing its brand identity and visual language in relation to the game. This helped set the tone of what core values and general style would be present, as well as helping prime me for using typography and iconography to create the posters & promotional materials.
Characters
The game features a human player character, child-animal hybrids in the halfway world, who are our NPCs, and animal characters that the player can turn into. As a game designer, my goal was not to create a finished artistic rendering, but rather create a reference for an illustrator or concept artist to work with.
Menu Screens
The Quiet Place features a silk-screen style menu that updates as the player completes the game. At the beginning of the game, the menu is dull and colorless. As the player progresses through puzzles and explores new areas, the screen moves to the left, revealing gradually more colorful panels. The player journey also becomes gradually more colorful, with new areas blossoming as players progress.
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Game Posters
After creating the title logo and logline, I went to work on poster iterations. I created 5 initial posters, before ultimately narrowing it down to the child and forest poster. The poster captures the painterly style the game is meant to have, the ambiguity of the title character, the atmospheric nature of the game, and some of the forest animals players can expect to see.
Sequels
As a fun bonus, I decided to create two sequel titles, The Quiet Place 2: Hanging Garden, and The Quiet Place 3: Sleeping Dragon. This helped me think about the world as a larger, more mysterious place with more gameplay opportunities.
