Repossession
Roles
Brief Summary
Repossession is a single player game where you play as a ghost in a house trying to wreck a house to that a family can’t move into the house. Meanwhile, the family hires a ghost cleanser to get rid of the ghost. Your goal is to break enough of the house to discourage the family so that they give up on trying to capture you and go find a new house to move into.
I worked on this game with a team of 15 people. We had 4 programmers, 3 designers, 7 artists, and 1 sound designer. My role on the team was to design the level for the game, help design the game’s “props” which are the game’s main mechanic, and running playtests for the game.
The Gameplay
When starting development, we planned on developing a game that played like a G rated version of a horror game. The player would be pressured to complete a task while an unstoppable entity tries to get the player. It would be mildly tense but overall, a game with much lighthearted fun. To accomplish this, we had several design questions to answer. Examples include: “How can we make the primary task of the player fun in its own right?” “How should the gameplay develop as the game progresses as to stay interesting?”
The Props
The props are the main mechanic of the game since you win by breaking them. To keep gameplay as interesting as possible, we aimed to make the props as diverse as possible while giving them each something that makes them useful. To do this, we gave each prop an ability. Some abilities effect the environment, and some allow the player to interact with the ghost cleanser in some way. In doing this, the player now has interesting choices in choosing which sequence of props they’d like to use for the best results or they can simply play casually and try out all the different props.
The Ghost Cleanser
The ghost cleanser acts as the one threat to the player during gameplay. He does not always know where the player is, but he listens and searches throughout the playthrough. To keep tension increasing, he becomes more aggressive as the game progresses. He also places traps around the level to make the player stumble. When ever he catches the player, a minigame begins where the player must input a sequence of key presses before a timer runs out. Each time the player is caught, the sequence is randomized, and the timer becomes shorter.
At first, we had planned for a rather different system to make the tension. In earlier versions of the game, the intent was to make the game more like Untitled Goose game by having multiple NPCs that could spot the player and the theme would not have had inspiration from horror games. After we realized that our team wouldn’t be able to make multiple different AIs with different behaviors, we made the pivot to having only one NPC. That NPC became the ghost cleanser.
The Level Design
The level in this game is designed to not only be easy to navigate and comprehend, but also to be similar in design to a real house. Some liberties were taken to make the space more fun to play in and the player will hardly notice these things during a normal game. In planning and creating the layout, my goal was to make sure that no matter where the player was, they were never totally backed into a corner. The player would always be provided a path to escape the cleanser if they had the skill to navigate the level properly. After testing and iteration, the result became the layout in the game now.
Contact Me
If you’re interested in working with me, contact me via email at [email protected].
You can also download my resume here.