Carcass

KEY SKILLS USED:
Level design:

The main element of this project was a map, and due to the approach this took for SS13's gameplay (see the description below), I had no good examples to draw from as inspiration. My priority was giving the player freedom to experiment and explore, and designing spaces where this experimentation would feel worthwhile.
Technical design:

The BYOND engine uses proprietary language called DreamMaker, which I wasn't knowledgable enough to write full scripts for at the time. To get around this, I modified existing game logic, including heavily altering a survival gamemode to get the proper conditions for the survival-horror gameplay I wanted.
SUPPLEMENTAL SKILLS:
- Writing (in-game logs and scenario)
- Additional 2D art (pixel art)

This was a solo design project created for university. It's an overhaul mod for Space Station 13 that reformats the entire game from a multiplayer social deduction game into a singleplayer pseudo-survival-horror experience.
This was a pretty big undertaking, as it required rebalancing the existing multiplayer survival mode to be fairer for one player, along with a map built around this new gameplay style that borrows it's design philosophy from SS13's existing "adventure levels", which are usually tiny areas that only have a fraction of SS13's  mechanics. I aspired to use a lot more of SS13's mechanics to add randomness and replayability. The resulting level is extremely unpredictable and at times, very unfair...

Creating the actual map took the most time, as SS13 maps require power lines, disposal pipes, fully sealed environments (to prevent the atmosphere from being sucked out the moment the game loads, of course), a full computer network, and a ton of other little details. I even found time to give it a unique tileset, and a short narrative hidden through text logs.

All of this required working in the absolutely ancient BYOND engine. This engine still gets updates, including a few that have made this mod incompatible, so unfortunately Carcass is now much harder to play. If you want to, you'll need to download an older version of BYOND. I made it with version 515.1647, but other versions before version 516 may also work.

The download also includes all the raw game files, which due to being made from a modded branch of Goonstation, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

 

Overall, this project served as a great exercise in unconventional, weirder game design, and good practice for my technical design skills.