Horror Game in Unreal | Mist Devlog

In my last year of university, I chose to participate in Augmented Reality class, in order to push my Unreal Engine skills further. The class is a great opportunity to create fast compositions and products, very open to experimentation and the current assignment we were given is the in-sighting incident of this devlog. In class, we started to learn about the basics of blueprints and how everything overall works and after seeing some old submissions from last year, I got inspired to create a new project: a horror-game vertical slice inspired by Silent Hill and Resident Evil. Silent Hill's gameplay mostly consists of exploration, evading enemies and solving puzzles, and I figured this was a simple idea for a submission. So, started on my horror game project: Mist.

I first started looking into some gameplay, videos and concept art for Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil Village, etc. After collecting some references and taking notes of the common traits between all of those games, I opened up MS Paint and created the most "professional" work plan in the world:

In this plan, I quickly wrote down the sketch of the level layout, what will happen in the prototype and what things I will need such as assets and gameplay elements. In the end, the main elements I required were: third person controller, locked door blueprint with key functionality, level sequences (cutscenes) and two levels I will jump between. With all of these written down, I started experimenting with the built-in character controller in Unreal and added my own blueprint scripts to make it behave more "Silent Hill-y" and while they were okay, the controller felt too snappy for a horror game and needed more weight and easing. I later replaced this first person controller with the "Animation Sandbox" third person template instead. This made the controls feel much better with smoother animations and with my own adjustments like making the movement slower, heavier and limiting the parkour capabilities (We are making a horror game, not Mirror's Edge) I realized that this template also comes with "Metahuman" compatibility.

While working with the third person controller, I was having a hard time deciding on what tool should I use to create a character for this project. I thought of finding an asset online, asking a modeler friend for help, and I even dusted off my old copy of Adobe Fuse, now discontinued character creator. But, none of them seemed flexible enough for my taste until I saw the template's compatibility with Metahumans. After asking my project teammate about Metahumans, I decided to try it out myself and created my own character within just an hour:

 

This is Isaac, my Metahuman character who will be the protagonist and the player character in Mist. While I only utilized the base Metahuman creator for this project, I am still very happy with the result. I made him slightly more "shiny" because many Metahuman examples often look very flat. I also purposefully made him look slightly sick by giving him yellow skin tone in parts of his face and dark ringed eyes. This look overall was inspired by how tired James looks near the end of Silent Hill 2. With my new protagonist created, after some trial and error I got him into my project and connected to my third person controller. The first time I saw him walk around, I could not stop smiling. Little by little, the project was starting to shape.

Finally, to put a checkpoint in my progress, I decided to work on the post-processing, lighting and assets. Normally post-processing and effects should be done last in these projects but atmosphere, fog and lights play a major role in this game since it is inspired by Silent Hill 2. After getting the effects and lighting figured out, I found some pretty cool assets in Fab store and imported them into my project and placed them into the scene and at the end of all of it, here is how the entire package looked:

Overall, for a first devlog a lot of progress has been made, and I hope to finish this as soon as possible so I can share it with all of you lovely people. Hope you enjoyed my first devlog post!