Cormoran
Cormoran is a 1st person horror game based off of the Cornish folk tale of Jack the Giant slayer, wherein Jack slays giants who have taken over Cornish castles, the first of which being Cormoran.
I began the project by creating the design document with all members of the team.
We began by outlining the vision, which then allowed me to settle on the following Design Pillars:
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Stealth - evading the main enemy AI
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Horror - Jumpscares on death and tense / scary visuals and sfx
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Accurate Tale / lore - Story and gameplay to follow what happened in the tale
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Linear - Progression is straight forward
We then began to concept the mechanics that we would use for the game based on the pillars above, basing some from inspirations. We then created base story beats off of the happenings in the tale, which were:
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Hack's father's horn stolen by Cormoran
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Cormoran taking St Michael's Mount
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Jack sneaking into the castle
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Jack digging a hole in the courtyard
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Jack using the horn to lure Cormoran into the hole
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Jack killing Cormoran with a pickaxe
With the design document set, each department could go and produce their required work. For myself, I began work on the level design of the game.
When I began the level design, we hadn't actually settled on the Linear progression, and the original intent was to be more open so that the player could choose which part of the castle to explore first.
This led to the first iteration of the level map and whitebox to be based on this idea where the courtyard would be the middle of the map, and the rest would be built around it. Ultimately, the team believed it to be too difficult to control the player and have them actually interact with our enemy AI in this manner effectively,
Ultimately, the team believed it to be too difficult to control the player and have them actually interact with our enemy AI effectively in a large open level (like Hello Neighbor where the level is so large that you will rarely encounter the enemy AI). This caused us to change the direction of the design to be linear progression oriented, which led to the Linear design pillar being instated.
I then produced a new level map based on the idea of the linear progression. The new flow of the level was to play out like this:
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Player enters castle and gets put in a cell by Cormoran
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Player escapes cells and finds key to get to Courtyard
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Player explores castle sector to find pickaxe and key to chapel
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Player goes through chapel to get to library and sleeping chambers to find horn and mend pickaxe
With this new linear level structure in place, we could guarantee that the player would interact with the Cormoran AI multiple times in the level as we would control where both Cormoran and the player are at a given time. This also allowed us to sequence the game and create our intended player experience.
I then work closely with the art team to provide guidance for the purpose / theme of each room so that they could be decorated with the appropriate assets (eg Library, bedroom, cells, store).
We then collectively decorated each of the rooms with the array of assets that the art team produced.
The team used various agile practices while working on the game. We used a taskboard to ensure that everyone was up-to-date on what work was being done and what needed doing. We also performed weekly scrum standups which allowed everyone to communicate what they had worked on and any concerns they had.
