The Veiled Ones
A first-person horror game about a Muslim exorcist trying to save his son from a jinn possession. Players must find clues using a tool called The Looking Glass that lets them see into an alternate dimension.
Developed in Unity for PC
Lead Designer | May 2023 - August 2024
As the Lead Designer on a team of 40+, I designed AI behavior, greyboxed level design, and gave direction & feedback to my team of 3 designers.
Our Summer Prototype
In 2 months, we built a small prototype to prove out our core gameplay. This included prototyped level design, a handful of interactable items, and most importantly, a basic AI of the Jinn.
GDD
As Lead Designer, I was responsible for writing & maintaining design documentation — both for our team and our faculty advisors. See in PDF here.
Level Design
In order to create stealth gameplay and facilitate environmental storytelling, I used Miro in combination with in-engine tools to analyze and implement our game’s level design.
Our first paper design of the layout of the house, broken down by sequence.
Paintovers on an in-game screenshot to figure out how to direct the player's eye to the right locations for the tutorial sequence.
Iterations of the first floor layout, trying to add loops and interesting navigation choices for players.
Mapping out enemy patrols (red) alongside common player paths (yellow) helped me decide where to place props, enemies, and interactable objects.
In playtesting, we found that the cemetery was too easy and the basement was too hard. After my analysis, I re-balanced our enemy patrol patterns to smooth the difficulty spikes out. (left = before, right = after)
Authenticity to Turkish Architecture
It was really important to us (and our Turkish game director) that we stay authentic to Turkish culture. We didn’t want this Resident-Evil-style-mansion to feel like a suburban house right out of Indiana, we wanted to use it to showcase aspects of Turkish culture.
In our earliest level design prototypes, we fell short of this goal. I then realized I had no idea what Turkish architecture looked like.
So I did a lot of research (maybe too much, in fact). I presented my findings to the team, and this informed our future level designs.
AI Design
In collaboration with our AI designer & AI engineer, I designed & prototyped behavior for our 2 enemy types in Unity’s Behavior Designer.
We designed behaviors for:
seeing the player (when visible or through the looking glass)
hearing the player
patrolling and investigating according to weighted parameters
chasing the player
opening doors (& closing doors behind them if they opened it)
