Necropolis Suite

About

Necropolis Suite is an immersive narrative-driven cosmic horror game about discovery, knowledge, and the meaning of transcendence. Can you escape the terror that lurks in the suite?

Live. Learn. Die. Transcend.

The player is JP Chambers a 1886 London detective tasked to investigate the fraud case of a man found raving in the streets, upon entering the house the player will explore looking for information to support the case but find a much deeper secret horror.

Role

I joined the team at Freesphere working part time on this title as a Technical Designer helping to refine and flesh out several mechanics with the aim of delivering the core pillars of the game. With my programming background I’ve taken on some of the work of setting up systems and tools for the rest of the team to use in delivering our vision. Issues with the package we initially started using means I am currently rebuilding all the interactions and mechanics from the ground up.

Responsibilities

• Translating ideas into practical actions in engine
• Setting up tools for art and design to use
• Documenting the best practise guide to adding blueprints
• Creating useful functions for use my others such as random noise positions based on player location
• Helping keep the features focused on the core goal of the game
• Breaking down the various steps and asset requirements for new features

Contributions

The structure in Freesphere Entertainment is fairly flat so a lot of the ideas are bounced around the team to refine them and some of my personal ideas are also included.

We use CVS files to store all the interaction text, descriptions and object names to make it easy to implement items in engine and also future proof us for any translations required in the future.

I set up the GitHub repository and automatic commit reporting in Discord to allow the team to see progress being made and boost morale and confidence. While it worked well the checking out process was not as robust as we enjoyed with Perforce so I also created the new repository on the P4 server for the game rebuild.

I’ve created several diagrams to communicate the desired goals and game loop to the team to help us all fully understand the gameplay loop and keep us on the same page as to the direction we were working towards.

We are moving away from a traditional inventory system having it in the game world by having set locations for items to either spawn or be placed by the player which can change through gameplay making ‘inventory’ management more of an aspect of the game and reserving the traditional inventory menu for the detective mechanics as information is found.

Each interactable may have different things it may do ‘on use’ so we implemented an icon system to show the player what type it may be, each possible interaction was defined in documentation and I set up the interactions to be a option to select within editor for simple implementation.

Working with our lead artist who was just learning to explore materials and materials instances in Unreal we created a system to have a ‘creep’ spread across the walls and furniture as the players level of ‘Insight’ increased.

In general being the best programmer on the team I am the central hub for the others struggling to integrate sound, visuals and any form of mechanic on top of me implementing additional features to help improve game play potential such as objects that are only visible if the player camera is passing over them at speed as a ‘corner of the eye’ mechanic and doors that loads/unloads streamed levels based on the direction the players interacts/leaves the door using simple Dot product checks.