About the game and its development conditions
Pale Reflections is a first person horror game set in an abandoned underground laboratory where the player accidentally find themselves. An invisible creature, the results of lab experiments, stalk the halls and hallways. To see and outmaneuver the monster, players must use mirror reflections while searching for the exit.
The project was an 8 week endeavor by 3 programmers and 3 artists using Unreal Engine 5.
Apart from blueprinting, I also took part in level and game design.
Blueprinting snippets below.
My role and contributions
UI Design & Programming
About half of my time dedicated to the project was spent on UI/UX. This was my first time working with UE5’s Widgets. Surprisingly, a lot of skills didn’t feel directly interchangeable between Unity’s UI canvas.
Me and a 2D artist designed the menu and player interface. The player interface in particular required many iterations as it went hand-in-hand with the inventory system which itself underwent a lot of changes throughout the project.
Systems Design
The player interactions with the world and the inventory system also underwent a few changes, but ultimately ended up as a quite traditional Quake-style slot system. I got to work with timeline-based animations, interfaces, line tracing, inputs, animation IK and physics.
I also made the game’s saving/loading in the form of a checkpoint system. This was definitely the biggest challenge of the project, and the one that had me debugging and troubleshooting the most. As the game is very deliberately paced, this system had requirements such as requiring identification of duplicate items for instance. The system is fairly limited with bespoke loading of each of the game’s interactables/items.
I was also responsible for tweaking and implementing new features to player character/movement such as crouching, limited sprinting, etc.