SHIFTED

DEVELOPMENT

As part of my bachelor thesis, this was the first serious project in years I would have to do entirely on my own. The main topic of my bachelor thesis was about creating a level sequence with a special focus on player guidance and the elements to achieve as such.

Since this project was solo developed, all usually split task areas where taken over by myself. Except for a few base sounds, it was a high ambition of me to really create necessary assets all by myself. One big reason for this was to take the whole production process into the written assignment of my bachelor thesis.

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Level & First Visual Concepts

Of course the first thing I needed to do is to get a rough idea on paper. Since we had to apply with a base concept of what we wanted to do before the thesis, this part was mostly done. However things like the setting, core gameplay, overall theme etc was very vague and so I put down some ideas.

First Prototype

I once worked on a concept where the player starts within a prison like cell, which opens for a defined time period. In that time the player would have to explore a level and escape out of a facility. On the way out, the player would encounter traps and puzzles to solve and proceed. All within a limited time until the cell starts to close again. If the player would not achieve to get back to the cell in time, that is when a survival mechanic will take over and players need to survive in the now hostile environment.  

 

I worked on this for 2-3 months until I realized I wouldn't achieve to complete this project in time. Afterall I also needed to consider the amount of time I have to write it all down for my written assignment.

Second Attempt

So back to the drawing board I tried something way more simple that really focuses on the idea of guiding and intentionally misleading a player through an environment. The idea of a descision making game come to life where every descision such as interact with a certain npc or chosing to walk through a specific path at a crossing would influence the outcome of this game.

 

The setting for this was pretty clear right at the beginning. A worker finally going home from his shift through a very uncomfortable office environment.  

 

At that point I achieved to found a much faster way of iterating level ideas and execute them inside Unreal. This helped me to have a basic prototype of the idea within just 2 weeks.

Style Iterations

As I worked on the office, I was still torn apart by what kind of style I would like to achieve with the remaining time left. Since most props I did where created within a PBR workflow, I felt quit limited to what I wanted to do. On the one hand, I wanted to try something darker and pixelated as it would wash away some details to make things look uncanny, on the other hand it was certainly a quit over used element which really didn't fit into the game atmosphere really.

I experimented with LUT Textures for a while and this turned out to be a better way of controlling the post processing for the scene in the end. 

Player Guidance

For the player guidance, I used several things. A limited color pallette where red would be reserved for the observer objects, signs with informations and directions for certain points of interest as well placed light sources that aim for a clear purpose. At some points I think I went a bit over the edge especially with all those cardboard boxes directing to all kinds of things as well as the lack of more informations of what to do and what there is to expect from the game in general.

Asset Creation

All visual assets in the game were fully created by myself with Blender, Substance Painter 2 and Substance Designer 6. I used a very standard PBR workflow for the objects but for optimization reasons, I was limited to 3 textures per object except for light sources. The first texture was a basecolor in the RGB Channels and Opacity in the Alpha channel. The Normal map as the second texture and a Merged Map for Roughness, Metallic and Ambient Occlusion. 

For sound effects I had to use a mix of own records and edits as well as licensed third party sounds from Epedimic Sounds at the time.

© 2025 Roman Wiegand