Masquerade
Masquerade is a thief inspired game where the player uses stealth. created for a Junior/Senior Collab project at Staffordshire University.

Unreal Engine 4 (4.20.3)

Prototyping - Jan 2019 (1 Week)
Development - Apr 2019 - June 2019

Role - SR Technical Game Designer (group)

Game Design Pillars

01.

Stealth Mechanics

02.

Challenging AI

03.

Combat Gameplay.

About

​A Robot Corporation has taken over Venice and has put a stop to the Venetian Festivals. you must use stealth and grapple hooks to traverse this dystopian Venice and collect the masks to restore the power back to the people and bring the festival back to life.

Team Members:
  • Alex Reynolds (Lead Designer)
  • Matthew Lamburn (Lead Technical Designer And QA Lead)
  • Calum Heffernan (Senior Technical Designer)
  • Emily Furniss (Lead Artist)
  • Ivan Terziev (Lead Artist)
  • Chidi Muomah (Lead Animator)
  • Alessandra Garber (Jnr Designer)
  • Kian Jackson (Jnr Designer)
  • Tom Coates (Jnr Designer)
  • Josh Innes (Jnr Technical Designer)
  • Ryan Thomason-Jones (Jnr Artist)
  • Borys Udodenko (Jnr Artist)
  • Serah Cassidy (Jnr Artist)
  • Adam Williamson (Jnr Artist)
  • Josh Jackson (Jnr Artist)
  • Ryan Hill (Jnr Artist)
  • Dan Somers (Jnr Animator)

Gameplay Video

Grapple hook Mechanic

One of the mechanics that I designed and implemented, Was the grapple hook mechanic. The idea behind this mechanic was to allow the player to have a better chance of escaping the enemy if required. But also allow the player to travel quicker through the level without being spotted by the enemy. The distance was clamped to a specific value which would stop the player abusing the distance they could travel as well as adding an ability timer to make the player use it at an appropriate time, making the player think and adapt to their surroundings.

AI Designs

Below outlines the work and some images of the blueprints created to get the AI features to work within the engine.

AI 1 - Sight Patrol AI

One A.I that was created by me was the Sight Patrol A.I, this enemy type would patrol points and will keep patrolling until the player broke the enemies line of sight. The enemy would advance the player until a certain distance was broken or if the player had defeated the A.I, if the player was able to break the distance then the A.I would return to the patrol path.
Above is the blueprint script for the lighting system. and will change the colour of the light on the enemy depending what state the AI is currently in. 
  • Green - Patrolling doesn't see the player
  • Yellow - Has spotted the Player a timer to decide whether to change to red or back to green.
  • Red - Player was too close and now the AI is chasing the player.

Below is the Behaviour tree for the Sight Patrol AI

Sound Patrol AI

The second A.I implemented was the Sound patrol A.I, this enemy type was designed to traverse around the level and only activate its behaviour tree once the player has caused too much sound in the vicinity of the A.I, the enemy would then chase the player until they were able to escape a certain distance or defeat the enemy.
Main focus was getting the AI to roam around a location and the use of blocking volumes allowed the Navigation path to be interrupted and stop the Sight AI getting in locations that was not intended for it to patrol.