6th Semester 2021
Team Mascha Ermakova, Arablle Heuer, Hanna Scheck
Restrictions New Engine, Working with Reference
Tasks Modeling and Animating, Programming.
Programs UE4, Blender, Substance Painter.
The Framing of the Drowning House
The Framing of the Drowning House is a PC game where the player travels through time and explores the story of the drowning house.
In The Framing of the Drowning House the player is a visitor in a museum in Kerala, India. They will experience the same room at different parts of the story and its gradual decay.
While diving into the frames they uncover the dark secrets of the drowned house by solving its mysteries while learning more about the people that lived there.
The room itself is based on traditional Kerala architecture. In the center is a courtyard that is open to the sky. The middle can also be viewed from the second story, which can be reached by a spiral staircase. No matter in which Act the player is, a bid door in the room will always bring them back to the main room.
There are picture frames through which the players can travel into the past. The paintings are blocked and have to be unlocked by bringing all Items of a kind to their respective depot which also results in getting a new story hint from a puppet in the museum.
To quickly gain a feeling for the room, we created prototype assets and then organized them into a block out inside Unreal.
The assets could then be updated without the need to redo the structure. The room is kept very neutral to set up different moods and atmospheres with lightning, furniture assets, and statues.
The furniture acts as a bridge between interactive objects and the room structure. The assets can be used in multiple ways and combinations like placements and scalings.
The game is divided into 7 parts: 6 Acts and a beginning room. Every Act has its own atmosphere, soundscape, and story.
In every room, the three characters tell the player their monologue by zooming into them. They retell the story of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe in a different setting.
Want to play the The Framing of the Drowning House? Go to the official itch.io Page!
We set our game‘s and semester‘s theme to be “reaching new horizons“. We took on this topic by choosing to make “The Framing of the Drowning House“ in a new game engine: Unreal. We saw this as an opportunity to learn about similarities between game engines and how they differ, previously only working with Unity.
Unreal also gave us the chance to explore a more realistic art style, with real-time lights, beautiful and simple fog, and nice post-processing effects, without being too focused if it would run smoothly (because it did).
Also working on a narration-focused game showed me the many ways a story can be told and how people will interpret it in their own way, It taught me how to place narrative cues and structure a nonlinear experience.
I learned many new workflows in Unreal and other programs and am very happy to have surpassed my horizon.
