Name: Maskerade: The Deadpan Cry
Studio: Spiky Duck
Duration: 9 months
Date: 2022
Team Size: 15 (6 designers, 5 programmers and 4 artists)
Genre: Survival horror
Engine: Unreal Engine
My rol: Mechanics, AIs, Encounters, Systems, UI & Scripting Designer; Producer (6 months)
Awards: Finalist of Best College Game of BIG Contest 2022
Maskerade is a First Person Survival Horror as Soma and Outlast, where the player incarnate a young girl who has been kidnapped and forced to work in a fantastic and terrific Cabaret, from which she tries to escape avoiding being caught by the workers and the Madame.
Game’s description
This is a very narrative oriented game, where the others ballerinas of the Cabaret tell you about this universe and it’s characters, along with notes, items and environmental storytelling. The story is the one guiding the player troughout the Cabaret where objectives are blocked by navegation obstacles, puzzles and enemies.
In order to overcome any of this obstacles, the player has to explore and interact with elements of the world. Doing so, helpful information and new navigation solutions can be discovered. Puzzles requieres specific items and the player to learn and understand the operation of some parts of the Cabaret.
As for the enemies, the player has to hide and use stealth to go unnoticed. The workers of the Cabaret search for the player using their senses including sight, hearing and even smell in the case of a specific and specially persistent enemy.
Inside this Cabaret called «Lumière du Néant», everyone wears an animal mask which produces strange effects. The longer a person stays in the Cabaret and the more they fall for its charms, the least consious this person becomes and their bodies turn into the animals of their masks. The main character of Maskerade, Catalina, also wears a mask which is the cat one.
As Catalina spend time in the Cabaret, she turns slowly into a cat gaining their capacities. One of them are claws that allows her to climb specific courtains and to picklock some locks that can be found around the place.
What I’ve worked on
Throughout this project I have worked in several areas:
Mechanics
HUD
AIs
Systems
Encounters
For all and every one of this areas I used the following methods:
- Research watching, playing and reading about similar games.
- Documentation of design decision and requirement.
- Prototype using scripting before others departments took part in any process.
- Review and explanation to others departments.
- Testing after others department delivered my requests.
- Iteration of all the aboves.
- Implementation of final version.
In addition to this design related work, I was the Producer during the first 6 months of the project. This was an additional role that I had temporarily and that I carried out at the same time as my design tasks.
Thibaut Lopez's portfolio 