The Game
Ethereal Estate is a sandbox game in which you play a ghost named Lulu. As an Ethereal Estate agent, your job is to haunt a mansion and its particularly listless inhabitants. No ghosts has been able to frighten the family that lives in it, until now. Use your incredible ghost powers and your ingenuity to scare the life out of this household. Roam through the house and fill up your you Comboo gauge by taking; throwing; smashing; eliminating and cleaning the content of the house, including the inhabitants, to unlock all its rooms.
This game was created as the last year project of our bachelor program. It was chosen after multiple screening and ultimately the entire class, more than 35 people worked on it.
Ethereal Estate is a sandbox game in which you play a ghost named Lulu. As an Ethereal Estate agent, your job is to haunt a mansion and its particularly listless inhabitants. No ghosts has been able to frighten the family that lives in it, until now. Use your incredible ghost powers and your ingenuity to scare the life out of this household. Roam through the house and fill up your you Comboo gauge by taking; throwing; smashing; eliminating and cleaning the content of the house, including the inhabitants, to unlock all its rooms.
This game was created as the last year project of our bachelor program. It was chosen after multiple screening and ultimately the entire class, more than 35 people worked on it.
My Role
I was the system design lead of the project Ethereal Estate. I was put in charge of 9 other members of our team ranging from UI artists to economic designers. My tasks were multipronged, I had to coordinate the different members and set objectives with them for the upcoming week. I had to keep tabs on their progress and help them if any problem appeared, dabbling multiple times in the AI, UX and economic departments. I also had to keep of the project at large and to update the rest of the game team of the advancements of the my group in Director/Lead reunions. Finally, I was in charge of coming up with all the objects and their unique systems as well as documenting all the design decisions in a document we called the Bible.
As the project progressed and the majority of the system design decision were made and the work diminished, I came to integrate the marketing team of the project. I took on the responsibility of publishing the game on Steam and coordinate the elements needed for our steam page, namely description, screenshots, trailers and art.
I was the system design lead of the project Ethereal Estate. I was put in charge of 9 other members of our team ranging from UI artists to economic designers. My tasks were multipronged, I had to coordinate the different members and set objectives with them for the upcoming week. I had to keep tabs on their progress and help them if any problem appeared, dabbling multiple times in the AI, UX and economic departments. I also had to keep of the project at large and to update the rest of the game team of the advancements of the my group in Director/Lead reunions. Finally, I was in charge of coming up with all the objects and their unique systems as well as documenting all the design decisions in a document we called the Bible.
As the project progressed and the majority of the system design decision were made and the work diminished, I came to integrate the marketing team of the project. I took on the responsibility of publishing the game on Steam and coordinate the elements needed for our steam page, namely description, screenshots, trailers and art.
Challenges
First of all, I integrated the team quite lately in the production phase and the project lacked a coherent structure at the time. The number of people working on the project had recently doubled and they were looking for someone to take the lead of the design department. Despite my recent arrival on the project, I was put in charge of it. Right away, I had the task of addressing the current problem of the game, mainly the lack of agency and purpose in the game. Being a sand-Box, these problem are inherent to the genre but the implementation of Easter eggs and the metric systems help erase the problem. The implementation of Easter eggs came in two versions. First, we designed a big central Easter egg that gives the player bonuses and information on the history of the house, serving as progression. We also put in place multiple mini Easter eggs which activate if the player make actions and use items in a way that relate to pop and horror culture. As for the metric system, it tracks all the the action made by the player and ranks the player according to the amount he made. Each time the player reaches a new milestone, he gets notified and ranked giving a sense of progression and objectives to aim for.
First of all, I integrated the team quite lately in the production phase and the project lacked a coherent structure at the time. The number of people working on the project had recently doubled and they were looking for someone to take the lead of the design department. Despite my recent arrival on the project, I was put in charge of it. Right away, I had the task of addressing the current problem of the game, mainly the lack of agency and purpose in the game. Being a sand-Box, these problem are inherent to the genre but the implementation of Easter eggs and the metric systems help erase the problem. The implementation of Easter eggs came in two versions. First, we designed a big central Easter egg that gives the player bonuses and information on the history of the house, serving as progression. We also put in place multiple mini Easter eggs which activate if the player make actions and use items in a way that relate to pop and horror culture. As for the metric system, it tracks all the the action made by the player and ranks the player according to the amount he made. Each time the player reaches a new milestone, he gets notified and ranked giving a sense of progression and objectives to aim for.