August 2023 - December 2023
Corpse Party
Horror-Comedy Game with Alternative Controller
Description
Corpse Party is an alternative controller game whose narrative is based on the novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. You play as Igor, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant. You are tasked to retrieve body parts necessary for Dr. Frankenstein’s Creature by robbing the graves of the recently deceased at a nearby cemetery. Then, you must return and arrange the parts you’ve collected into the perfect Creature. But is a head necessary? Could your body have four arms? Anything goes, as long as Dr. Frankenstein is satisfied.
The game was developed for Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center to be showcased at the program’s annual festival and was a faculty pitch project for the Fall of 2023.
Narrative Design Document
As the Lead Narrative Designer, I created a Narrative Design Document for the project that contains all of the game’s narrative content, including bark sheets, character descriptions, and final cutscene script. The link to the final Narrative Design Document can be found below.
Storyboard/UI Mockup for Initial Design
I proposed the initial game loop. The Player is a Dr. Frankenstein-like figure who runs a shop for ghosts. Each ghost makes specific requests for which type of body they would like to inhabit in order to fit into the living world. The requests could range from being athletic or good at math to being a talented dancer. The Player would then go grave robbing in order to recover the body parts needed for the specific body, and come back to the shop to assemble them.
After discussing the concept of the game with our team, I created a UI mockup for the different phases of the game loop.
Paper Prototype
On the right is the initial paper prototype I created for our game. The Player interactions happen between three different stages.
The first one, the “shop” stage, where the Player receives the request for a body.
The Player then travels to the “cemetery” stage, where they must read the gravestones in order to figure out which body parts lie there, all while avoiding the cemetery guard.
The third stage is the body assembly scene, where the Player uses the stolen body parts to create a monster that fits Dr. Frankenstein’s requests.
Playtesting and Iteration
Our team made several prototypes over the course of the semester, iterating over the initial game loop. While some of the paper prototype playtests indicated the Player found the body assembly to be the most fun, other Players gravitated toward the excitement of the cemetery, and avoiding the guard. Our first digital prototype had 2D art in a 3D scene, similar to the gave Don’t Starve, but after running into technical issues we pivoted toward a fully 3D scene with 2D character animations.
One of the biggest problems we ran into was a clash between the gravestone reading mechanic, which required time and patience from the Player, and the avoiding the guard mechanic, which meant the Player needed to move quickly through the cemetery. Often Players did not read the graves and instead picked up as many body parts as possible before the guard could catch them.
We tried to deal with the problem by having shorter epitaphs that were to the point and by allowing the Player to hide in the bushes, giving them the option to not have to run away as quickly.
Initial 2D level
3D level with 2D characters
Alternative Controller
Our team had gone through several ideas for alternative controllers. In the end, due to scope, we have implemented the controller only for the cemetery stage, and used a touch screen for the body assembly stage.
We used a touch frame for the cemetery stage. A touch frame can detect touch or movement within it without the need of a screen. It allowed us to have the Player place their piece in a designated spot, and have the character on the screen move to that spot in-game.
(Bottom) The touch screen body assembly level.
(Top) Initial Design: The Player navigates through the cemetery using a board game-like interface.
(Bottom) Final layout of the interface. The Player uses a real shovel to dig through real gravel to uncover the body parts in the game.
Main Takeaways
Throughout the project, we struggled to come up with mechanics and alternative controller concept that meshed well. Approaching it mechanics-first meant that we had to create a controller that fit well with the mechanics, and approaching it controller-first meant that the mechanics might not turn out interesting. We learned that having a dual approach, where the controller and mechanics are part of the same initial design idea, would have been the best way to go.
We’ve also learned that trying to make two contradicting mechanics work, like reading and fast-paced gameplay, is not the best idea. A better approach would have been to pick one over the other, and have that be the primary mechanics that all others complement.
