Concept

Slum 77 tells the story of prisoners locked in an underwater station located on some foreign planet. Their goal is to escape the station as it is invaded by endemic creatures who slaughter every living person. As the creatures are blind and can only hunt using sound, players will have to cooperate and use the environment to their advantage to outsmart their predators.

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This is my final year project, its creation started less than a year ago and will be finished by june 2019. We work as a team of 7 students : 2 game designers, 2 game programmers and 3 game artists.

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Challenges​

• Ship a long-term project, with real work conditions

• Provide a horrific, innovative multiplayer experience

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Solutions​

• Since October 2018, our time at school is fully dedicated to the making of Slum 77. As the game must be shipped by June 2019, we quickly understood the necessity to optimize our work force. We took our time to setup efficient workflows and refine the game design. We took our time and didn't hesitate to try several iterations to achieve satisfying results. Once we were happy with the direction we are heading, we decided, around the end of January, to start the production of the game. Our last summer internship definitely helped us as we are now all used to management tools to make work and communication easier. On top of that, level design production is improved by the help of modular tools that allow me to quickly iterate on levels while making the game artists work more efficient in the long run.

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• Our benchmark showed us that very few games provide a horrific multiplayer experience. Many problems were raised early on regarding the multiplayer aspect of the game, as it is very hard to design a scary setting while constraining players to experience it both at a same time. We came to the conclusion that we had to encourage players to cooperate and stick together at some key moments to deliver convincing dreadful moments. We are aware that we cannot reinvent everything to make the project work, which is why our thorough search for references during pre-production became very helpful for every pole in the team, as we have now some solid basis to design a scary game with a multiplayer twist.

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