Kevin Hong-de Yan
Welcome to Kevin's personal website
What is The Unseen?
The Unseen is a 2.5 top down stealth + puzzle solving game. With simple graphic and art style, The Unseen focuses on gameplay and introduce an unconventional mechanic that player would not have to avoid the lights unlike most of the stealth game. Instead, the player controlled avatar has the ability to shift between "light" and "shadow" form, thus the avatar remains invisible and invulnerability when it is in the correct form that fits with the environment it is in.
Creators of The Unseen:
Game Designer: Kevin Yan, Tianmu "Jeffrey" Lei
Level Designer: Kevin Yan
Programmer: Tianmu "Jeffrey" Lei
Composer: Christopher Allison
Special Thanks: Peter Brinson, Margaret Moser, Jesse Werner
Prototyping Phase:
Starting with a idea that we want a 2.5D top-down stealth game that plays around the "light and shadow" combination, we made several paper prototype to test out how to implement dynamic lights. We ended up with the shown paper maze on the right.
Unfortunately, we did not keep this paper prototype or the video of it. We pointed a flashlight to the center of the maze, and rotate the flashlight horizontally, kept pointing the flashlight toward the center of the maze. This is the dynamic lighting mechanic we wanted.
Early Development:
Our next step of prototyping it in the Unity editor did not go smoothly, especially with the rotating light source. Thus, we switch back to the traditional top-down vertical light source to create light sources that made it easier for me to do level design.
We also added guards to the game, as they are "must-have" for any stealth game.
The "Light" and "Shadow" Forms
To ensure the invisibility in both lighted areas and unlighted areas, I must figure out a solution for players to have conditioned invisibility. The solution is "teleport" (or call it "blink"). Players must perform teleport to have the avatar switch between "light" and "shadow" form, so they must choose wisely about the destination of their teleport.
Gotta build the Scenes
After the major design are locked down, I started building levels as Jeffery develop the tools (prefabs) for me to use. I also added patrolling guards, switches and button that affect the on/off of certain light sources and walls. The red cubes that replenish the number of teleport that players can use, so players cannot teleport infinitely.
Finally Done:
After some crunching, we finally delivered the game. The game consist of three levels and several tutorial level, in which I also designed the UI and tutorials. It was well-perceived by our professor as they fell for the unique stealth mechanic I created.
My contributions to The Unseen are:
-
Brainstormed an unconventional stealth game mechanics.
-
Designed and implemented all the tutorials and level, and the related puzzles.
-
Designed and implemented the UI and indicators to guide players.
-
Maintaining production backlogs and documentation.
