An Unknown Presence

By Team Fan-tazem

About

An Unknown Presence is a 3D First Person Mystery Time-Traveling Puzzle game made with Unreal Engine 5. After the player as a new security guard gets recruited on a radio station and finds out they are nobody in the radio station at all. Facing the time police tried to chase the player. Now the player needs to find a way to get out of the radio station.

Project Info

Role: Technical Director, Gameplay Programmer
Team Size: 7
Time frame: Fall 2022 - Spring 2023
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Repository: TortoiseSVN

Game Trailer

Introduction

This project is a two semester project Digipen's GAM300 and GAM350 game project. For this GAM300 and GAM350 class are focusing on design a strong concept and planing workflow more professionally. Our team decided to use Unreal Engine 5 as our game engine. And all of our member are programmers.

Technical Director

As team's technical director, I help team setting up the repository with TortoiseSVN. Since I haven't use this source control before, I have a hard time setting it up but at the end its work. Another thing I did as a technical director is plan out structure of all feature I could think of in diagram at the very begining to avoid problem further on when we work on the project.

After I plan out the main game system, I started to talk with other members to separate main role for specific task for each member discuss about time frame taking in each task. And when they done with their task I would have a code review for specific complex function they implemented so I understand the code in case others ask why/ what the part of code for.

Gameplay

This project actually the first project I use the Unreal Engine 5 to create game. I have to do a lot of research on early of the project to familiarize myself with the enigine before so I would be able to plan a good code structure for the team.

First Person Camera

Our game decided to be a first-person puzzle game. Even though Unreal Engine 5 already have a pre-made First Person Shooting controller for us but the controller are lack of model and some feature we need so I implement a new one for this project.

Time Travel Object

In order to implement the time-traveling mechanic, we need to create an object type that is in the past or future to make an illusion of time traveling. I wrote this mechanic as a component putting on top of the object to choose which timeline it belongs. By deactivating all other timeline objects and activating all these objects in the background while showing the transition.

Interactable Object Base

In this game, there are a lot of interactive game objects in the main gameplay and puzzles that the player needs to interact with to solve the puzzles. I implement the base class of the component for other members using it to create things on top. namely;

Key, Door
Electric Generator
Elevator Button

Hiding locker

On top of the interactable object, I also use it to implement a hiding locker with it. Since the player needs a way to hide or escape the chasing enemy hiding a locker is one of the great ideas. I create the hiding locker with a smooth camera transition into the locker.

Highlight Puzzle

While playtesting the game, we found out that the puzzle was confusing and large level making players lost so we needed a hint to guide the players through. I implemented the hint system that highlights the interactable object through walls which the player needs to grab next.

Level Designer

Because of the lack of a designer in our team, I have to shift to do level design too. I really like playing puzzle games so I don't mind designing puzzles myself here is my sketch of the level I designed.

The final level sketch

Have Fun ^ ^

An Unknown Presence is a 3D First Person Mystery Time-Traveling Puzzle game. After the player as a new security guard gets recruited on a radio station and finds out they are nobody in the radio station. Getting chased by the time police, the player needs to find a way to get out of the radio station.

Play Game