Fox Hollow Drive

DEVELOPMENT

The first step with every new project and team is getting to know each other and talk about skills and preffered roles with the upcoming project.

The Game Design part will be taken over from all of us again. However as I got asked to join this team, it was very clear from the start, that it would be a narrative driven experience rather then a typical game with a create core mechanic. 

For this project we settled to go for story game based on true crime events. From the game design perspective, we wanted to make things as simple as possible and create a uncanny atmosphere through the changing characters perspectives and the unsettling events the player will play through. 

After the main concept was established, we made a clear destribution of tasks and roles for a more structured workflow.

My main tasks were programming the core systems inside Unreal Engine 4, design the needed outdoor environment, modelling hero objects the players will interact with, asset management and direction, version and source control management through git and github, our entire lighting setup as well as baking all required lightmaps and ensure objects lightmap uv's are compatable and last but not least the core level design and modelling of our main map.

The reason for this was, I was the one most experienced with Unreal Engine and so, I was also teaching my collagues about the engine as some never touched Unreal before. This turned out to be quit the challenge but the concept of a narrative game really helped out not to overscope and really take it as a learning project for us.

FAKESCREENSHOTS / VISUAL CONCEPTS

CONCEPT DESIGN ITERATIONS

For this game, we wanted to take the story we chose to take seriously and be respectfull of the events that happen. We planned out the priorities of what we would have to research first. One of these priorities used to be the location for the story. The house where all of this happened.

We were looking on real estate websites for houses at the New Jersey area to get a feel of what the neighbourhoods and houses look and feel like. After pinning down some examples we settled for one house that apparantly did come really close to the house of "The Watcher House" case, from what we were told by our true crime enthusiast of the team.

PROTOTYPE

After we settled, we found out the actual house messures and plans to work with. I was assigned to recreate a rough blockout at first so we can play around and let a basic first person controller walk through the rooms. We wanted to know how the proportions are and how the house layout feels inside the game.

As we decided to go through with this, I modeled the house step by step, always keeping up a stream of feedback of what kind of windows we should use, the wall colors and especially, what rooms will serve what purpose. Kitchen, batchroom and livingroom were givin by the house layout. Since our story involves a whole family, I needed to know, which room should become the kids bedroom, work room and so on.  

IN ENGINE SHOTS

By now, the production process has began for me as I was creating some of the hero objects such as the the hamster cage including or the bed for Emma, one of our protagonists who player would play right at the start.

Besides creating assets, I also optimized the third party assets, the other team members found or created. Most assets unfortunatly had quit unoptimized uv maps if they had some at all. Since I was creating the core lights by now, I needed to make sure that the static lighting we used, was creating good looking shadowmaps and enhanced the desaturated untextured style of the game. Colors were used very precisly within a context of the game and so, only light temperature changes within the rooms were making out the core color pallette.   

Core Systems

The Game Systems were pretty simple. We had a player controller that would interact with a few objects and could change it's height depending on the current chapter.

A very basic inventory system would make sure that items collected within one chapter will influence the upcoming one in some way .

GAME SHOTS

In the end, we only managed to finalize 2 out of 5 planned chapets but somehow tried to include the third one in the end. Most of the outside environment I did for the later chapters as well as the basement area unfortunatly never did it into the final game except one single sequence within chapter 2.

Still I was very pleased of the overall outcome we managed to create in the end. 

© 2025 Roman Wiegand