Monophobia
Monophobia was a game I created during my college years, due to my skills being less refined back then, I focused on producing something that felt more deep than it truly was, banking on player immersion over intense technological details.
The horror game was set in a cabin in the middle of a snowstorm, upon which the player was given first person freedom to explore the two floor cabin. Behind the scenes however, a countdown timer would begin and upon certain intervals being hit, events would begin to play in the cabin in order to simulate hallucinations gradually getting worse.
The trick I intended for replayability, was the random events I had in the cabin set up, with each replay a different roll of the dice would be made resulting in different hallucinations and thus a wide variety of unpredictable outcomes for the player to brace for but inevitably be unprepared for as the intended goal was to have at least 20 different events for each "tier" of hallucination intensity.
As stated, this was my first official attempt at a game, I had limited knowledge on how to do certain things in Unreal and as such, opted to work with that I had and if I encountered any problems I couldn't overcome, I would spend as long as it took to learn the new skill or function in Unreal before implementing it.
The map was the first part, using the geometry available to me, I created a small house with two floors, a living room, kitchen, stairway, bathroom, a bedroom and two rooms.
I then filled out items I couldn't tidily create with geometry such as balcony guards and doors with free assets available at the time, ensuring they were as few and far between as I could and ensuring my own work was used as much as possible, call it guilt, call it something else, I simply could not at the time justify flooding my game with assets beyond what I desperately needed at the time to sell my idea. That being said, I accomplished it and began work on texturing the map.
The events would prove to be my first dip into learning how to code in Unreal Engine. I created an event timer which would count up from 0 the moment the game began, I then created conditions where upon a number being reached, a random number would be chosen, from there, the corresponding event would play in game. For example, If the timer hit 300 seconds (5 minutes), the game would pick a random number between 1 and 10 (10 being the events allocated to that event) Lets suppose the random number is 6, if so, then the texture of the painting on the wall will change from two people staring at eachother to staring straight on towards the player.
The specifics of this number sequence was so that as the time went on, I could allocate specific events to specific numbers, thus allowing a gradual increase in intensity to the events while also retaining it's randomness.
The project unfortunately was lost to me and I only have my documentation on the subject (Hence the pending images along the sides of this text which I intend to replace as I take pictures of the paperwork to upload). However, I believe a revisiting of this game would be a relatively easy and fun project to undertake to not only see how quickly I can revisit and complete this task, but to also see how much I can optimise within the code and if there are any further changes I could make, such as conditions to only allow random events to play if the player is near and not looking at the area the event is about to change, thus increasing chances of the player stumbling onto it as well as ensuring they cannot break the tension I am aiming to build throughout the gameplay.