The Arkham Incident
First-person
Exploration
Puzzle
Made in
1 month
A game where you explore and find a way to escape Arkham
ROLE : System Designer/Progammer
CONTEXT
The Arkham Incident is a workshop project made in the context of my 2nd year of my 2nd Game Design bachelor. It was made in 1 month with Unity 6 and a group of 4 people for the Game Design part.
The theme was to make a game taking place in the Batman Universe with a strong emphasis on narrative.
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In this game, you play as a prisoner of the Arkham Asylum and you try to escape after an incident which freed everyone from their cells.
You therefore explore, find objects and clues to help you find a way out.​​
GAME DESIGN
Since the game was supposed to be focused on the narrative aspect, we thought that an exploration game with puzzles could fit perfectly.
Then, for the setting, we decided to go with the Arkham Asylum, because it's an emblematic place of the Batman Universe that could allow us to show lots of villains.
We didn't want to include Batman because we thought it was too predictable, too classic. Using the Batman villains seemed more appropriate, more challenging and more interesting to talk about the franchise's universe.
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The gameplay is therefore simple : the player can walk around, inspect objects and interact to resolve puzzles and find a way out.
Mechanics
Movement
As usual when designing first-person game, I designed a simple walking mechanic with head bobbing to add to the immersion.
There's also a crouch mechanic, allowing the player to fit through vents and see through the hole in doors.
Inspect
The game being focused on interacting with the environnement, we thought that implementing an inspect mechanic was perfect so the player could look for clues when manipulating objects.
The FOV changes and there's a depth of field effect when inspecting an object as a feedback to indicate that you are in the inspect mode.
The funny thing was with the manipulation mechanic when inspecting and the direction you have to move your mouse to rotate the object.
For some people, it seemed more intuitive with inverted controls, so we added a check box in the options !
Grab
As said before, there are grabbable objects, this mechanic being useful for the player to move objects around like keys, cassettes or badges.
The object moves itself in the bottom right of the screen to indicate that it's being hold in the "inventory", while objects being inspected stay in the middle.
At the start, for grabbable objects, the player had to first inspect them, then grab them with "E". But with playtests, we found out that is wasn't convenient, so we added the option to directly grab an object with "E" so the interaction felt smoother.
Interact
