Yibing
Chen
Game Designer & Level Designer
ANAMNESIS
Team Size: 4 | Engine: Unreal Engine 4 | University Project [October - November 2021]
My Roles: 2D & 3D Artist, Level Designer, Narrative Designer
Anamnesis is a first-person thriller horror game (demo). It is a four-week project adapted from John Eblahan’s 1-week demo, Brutalist, for the Major Studio class. The player wakes up in a strange, desolate world, surrounded by distorted brutalist architecture. They lose all their memories and must discover and face a murder mystery by exploring the areas. The game is divided into a hub world and an enclosed maze. The hub world is an introductory place where players gather pieces of information; the maze is where players avoid monsters, navigate the level, and piece the story together. The end goal of this version of the game is to navigate the maze and collect the leg (key). In our visioned story, players will find out at the end of the game that they are the killer.
All the assets in the game (shader, 3D models, graffiti, audio) other than the default mannequin are original.
I was the lead visual designer for this project, and I wanted to hone my atmosphere design skills through this project. I developed all the 3D models in Maya and 2D art in Photoshop. This was my first time using Unreal Engine 4 and implementing 3D models in an engine. I took the black-and-white visual and the brutalist art direction from the original demo and expanded upon them. Since the game world is like limbo, I wanted the overall atmosphere to be weird and over the top to show the main character being on the verge of a breakdown. I distorted the light poles and blocks and extruded to all directions in the hub world. I put many spray paints in both the hub world and the maze to guide players and create an atmosphere of B-level horror movies.
Besides art, I also participated in narrative and level design. For the murder mystery, I made it no longer grounded in reality -- again, we wanted all elements to cater to our twisted, edgy atmosphere. The narrative is intentionally vague, so the players need to piece things together and be able to insert themselves. Since we wanted the horror aspect to be more psychological, we made the monster undefeatable, taking away the player's power. We made the maze uneven so players had more areas to explore; the vertical design also enabled us to enhance the narrative and amplify the horror atmosphere. I left a garden of light poles behind the main building in Hub World; if we keep developing this game, we will utilize the garden for the next level.
Work in Progress
Hub world iteration one in Maya
Building iteration two
