The Fifth Blade
ROLE
Lead Designer
DESCRIPTION
The Fifth Blade is a Stealth Horror about traversing a labyrinth deep underground, aiming to get to the end and escape the horrors which lurk within. I was Lead Designer, and among my responsibilities was designing the majority of the level as well as the ideas for the various hazards the players would run into.
Level Design
One of my big roles in this project was designing the level - I was first producing with the goal of procedural levels in mind, before we decided instead to keep the level as hand-made. This ended up working in my favour, as I could create a maze with multiple layers which worked seamlessly.
As I developed, I found out that people wanted a less difficult level, as it was too easy to fall down into a pit and die unfairly. In reaction to this, I made a cave under the maze which was higher danger but eliminated your chance of dying from a misstep, still keeping the punishment but not making it tedious.
This level evolved multiple times, developing through the months as I learnt what would be easier for a player and how to build a scary atmosphere.
World + Narrative Design
As part of this game, we had to focus on a world which we had crafted prior to the game's conception. I had a world prepared which we used to base the game off of, and as such, I drove a lot of the worldbuilding and narrative off of this idea. While it evolved and changed throughout, I had to keep a coherence between the theme and the game itself, always trying to keep the core aspect of the world - Hope - In the gameplay.
The world I came up with, named Viomi, had a fundamental base in a resource in the world - Ichor. This was an oil-like resource found in the earth, which was used to power machinery and augment human life. This made its way into the game as a light source, as well as the thing powering all the deadly traps. The Ichor is guarded by the Froros, seen in game as a creature which chases you around the maze.
While the original world idea strayed far from what it begun with, it still kept these core themes.