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The Veiled Ones is a first-person 3D horror game where you play as a Muslim scholar trying to save your son from a Jinn possession.
Made with Unity
Position: Level & AI Designer
The Veiled Ones
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Created 2D sketches and greyboxes of the house’s prototype for horror gameplay and iterated based on weekly playtest feedback. Designed hiding spots, unlockable shortcuts, and crafted narrative elements.
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Designed Father Jinn behavior tree for cat & mouse interactions and realistic logic using the AI’s senses to seek out players in different scenarios.
What I did
My work on The Veiled Ones
Level Design
The Veiled Ones is set in an abandoned house. My task was to create the level design of the house for our Prototype and deliver our First Playable milestone when school started. Creating a level design for a horror game set inside a house has its constraints since the environment is limited to a small space and my design also had to support exploration and hide-and-seek interactions between the player and the Jinns
My first step was to identify player and enemy mechanics that can be performed and list them out:
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Walk (player)
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Sprint (player)
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Crouch (player)
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Interact with Items (player)
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Use Looking Glass (player)
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Seek (enemy)
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Patrol (enemy)
With this list, I was able to scope out what level design is needed to support it. I also set up some goals I wanted to achieve such as discoverable shortcuts and hiding spots.
Next, I did some research on level design from games with similar principles and settings for inspiration so I could understand what works and what could be improved upon. Rainbow 6 Siege was one of my primary inspirations because of its small map, particularly the House and Oregon map, which resemble the similar play space our game should have.
After researching, I sketched out some shapes of rooms for my first draft. The house had 2 floors, so I wanted to make sure that players could find clever ways to traverse from one to another when they had to escape from the Jinn.
In the first version, I focused on the layout of the rooms in relation to each other so I didn't go into details of the layout inside each room. The sketch featured rooms that connected with each other on the 1st floor through a hallway which served as a way to quickly traverse through each other. On the 2nd floor, I created one long hallway that wrapped around the entire floor which allowed quick access to each room with cracks in the wall that players could squeeze through. I designed it this way so that if players had to escape from the Jinns, they could quickly enter a room or go from one room to another. They could even drop down from the end of the hall (labeled "jump" in the sketch) to go down the stairs quickly.
This design received positive feedback but for the next iteration, I wanted to create a sketch that was only one floor so that we could easily achieve a playable level for the summer and test out our game's core loop as soon as possible.
In this 2nd version, I focused on 4 rooms and the content in each room. I still carried over my principles from the first iteration by connecting the rooms in different ways and exploring each room as part of the progression. The player's objective was to open the locked door with the star symbol above it and to do so, must travel through the Study Room, Dining, Room, Living Room, and Children's Room to gather clues to unlock the objective door. During this iteration, I had to also consider the spacing of the environmental elements to support player movement and ability to hide from the Jinn, as well as the Jinn's ability to roam around and seek the player.
One of my favorite parts of this iteration was the piano puzzle where the player had to collect a music book from the Children's room and play the given keys on the Living Room's piano to unlock an underground shortcut from the living room to the Children's Room's closet.
After this iteration, I made several more until we were satisfied with a level design that best supported our game's pillars, fit the theme, and was achievable to build out during the summer.
After 5 iterations, I settled on the following level design sketch which was smaller compared to others but had all of the elements we needed to test out our game's core loop.
Level Research
My next step was to greybox the level design in Unity Engine. While greyboxing the level, I also took into consideration the height of environments to the player and Jinns so that they were in proportion and nobody would become stuck and unable to move in crowded areas.
After playtesting the map multiple times, I collaborated with design, art, and usability teammates to set dress it, implement our narrative systems, and conduct tests with external playtesters for further iterations. This was the final version of the level I worked for the project:
Gameplay Walkthrough
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