The Lodge

The Project

The Lodge is a short, psychological horror game made in Unreal Engine 4 using the Horror Engine template. It was made over a 15-week term by Red Skies, a 27-person group.

The Lodge features three heavily-scripted levels. Its gameplay is mostly composed of two puzzles in the second and third levels: the first is a sequence puzzle that requires the player to throw letters into a fireplace in the right order, and the second is a series of 3×3 pattern puzzles.

Initially, development of The Lodge was slow and listless. The design team was very understaffed and did not codify a clear set of design goals early on, leading to scattershot progress.

To fix this, we restructured the group. The narrative team was given creative control and put in charge of game design, while the design team switched their focus to level design. One of the writers and I then joined the design team, bringing the team’s active members to three and allowing each of us to focus on a level. In doing so, we refocused our efforts and managed to get the project back on track, finishing just before the last day of the term.

My Role

For this project, I worked as both an engineer and a designer. As an engineer, I developed a number of level assets, and as a designer, I put those assets to use in the game’s second level.

My first task as an engineer was to develop a portal mechanic that would enable the illusion of weird geometry. As I was not very familiar with Unreal, I used this task as a chance to learn by translating an online example written in C++ into my own script written in Unreal Blueprints.

Once the portal was complete, I moved on to developing a transitioning smoke and fire effect for textures on the second level, as well as a sequential trigger box and supporting assets for the level’s fireplace puzzle. When I switched to the design team, I then got to put my assets to use, as I was put in charge of the second level’s development. I assembled nearly every scripted event in the second level, the one exception being the knife that flies past the player when they first start moving.

Finally, my last contribution was the 3×3 pattern puzzle box mentioned in the project description, which was put to use in the third level as an obstacle.