Don't Get Ghosted
Team Project
Introduction
In a ghost world, you have to juggle texting your boo to avoid a break-up without your boss catching you slack off.
Developed over 10 weeks
Team of 5
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​Responsibilities:
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Wrote over 85 dialogue choices and weighted responses for ghosted lose condition
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Implemented multitasking system where the player switches between a maze chase mode and dating sim mode, avoiding 2 lose conditions
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Created level
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Designed AI behaviors for fired lose condition
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Recruited playtesters and implemented feedback for difficulty balancing
Goal
When pitching this game, my goal was to have the player quickly switch between quirky dialogue choice narrative mode and a stressful maze stealth/escape mode. This way the two modes blend into each other, making the player feel as frantic as the character.
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Paper Design to Final Product
Level Layout Process
I started out with the negative space, filling out the player's path in charcoal. I wanted an area for the player to circle around in regularly. The additional fax delivery task is set on the left side of the room in a long hallway to build suspense as the player tries to deliver it to the front desk on the opposite side of the room.
Blockout Process
Once we decided desks should be 1 by 1 units long I made a rough outline of where they would be on a grid, then made a mock-up in Maya. One of my teammates referenced this to block it out, and I made a few edits.
Narrative Design Process
One of my teammates and I decided what kind of personalities and backgrounds the characters should have. She contributed a handful of lines and I wrote the rest. Once all the dialogue options were written, I pasted them into a CSV file and imported them into Unreal as a data table.
Gameplay Overview
The player has to finish their 5 minute shift while avoiding two lose conditions: fired and ghosted.
Fired Lose Condition
If the player is seen not working by the boss, this changes the boss from patrol mode to chase mode, where he chases the player through the maze. If the player is touched they get fired. The office is filled with stacks of papers the player can sort; if they’re seen working on these, the boss switches back to patrol mode and moves on.
Ghosted Lose Condtion
The player’s break up meter constantly increases towards break up, so the player must return to their phone every spare moment they get to keep it down. If they neglect their Boo or choose poor dialogue choices, the meter reaches break up, and they get ghosted.
Additional Task
1.5 minutes into the shift, an additional fax tax begins. For the rest of the game, within an increasingly shorter intervul, the player has to go to the fax machine down the hall to deliver the fax to the other side of the map, the front desk. Getting to the fax machine with enough time to deliver it to the other side can be difficult, but once the player has the fax, the boss will see them as working for as long as they carry it. [cute fax gif] If the player fails, the boss is automatically triggered into chase mode.
Narrative Designer
Choice Weight
For the dating sim part of the game, the player’s choices are weighted: good, medium, and bad. Good choices bring down the meter by a lot, medium choices by a medium amount, and bad choices make it even worse.
Setup
The player, Hans House, is revealed to have forgotten a special date, he and his girlfriend, Boo had been planning for months, in part due to his failure to confront his boss who made him take an extra shift. Hans wants to reassure her he’s sorry, so he frantically texts her, but unhealthy lines like: “I’m a dumpster ghost. :(” won’t cut it.
Branching Paths
One of the earlier dialogue choices allows you to go down one of 3 different conversation paths: family drama, and their current lives, and their past selves at university. To initiate the branching paths I kept the weight of the negative decisions but made them tempting. The choice “IDK” is short enough to allow unfocused players to get back to the movement mode of the game; the long answer may keep the break up meter down the most, but it takes the most time to read, and “Because your family is freaky” is blatantly unwise, but fun enough to tempt players with its path.
Endings
In the late game, if players are responsive enough to answer most of the questions, the branching paths merge into a conversation about how the characters feel about their relationship overall. This gives the player the opportunity to enter a positive or negative feedback loop till the end of the game
Environmental Storytelling
Office Ghosts
Other than Hans and the boss, the only other characters are frowny, grey Office Ghosts. One motionlessness floats by the front desk awaiting fax deliveries. Just as Hans sorts most of the papers on the map these “afterlifeless workers,” unsort the papers, restarting the sisyphean cycle—at least it’s something for him to do, while his boss patrols.
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Level Flow
Level Flow Overview
I wanted the player to constantly fear getting caught by the boss, so I kept any potential hiding spot small enough to only guarantee a few seconds of safety. In the early game, the player can take advantage of the vast stacks of paper around them, but since they spawn slowly, the player quickly learns to ration nearby papers throughout the rest of the game. In the first half of the game, I wanted the player to get used to the maze. Then halfway into the game, the additional task of delivering faxes to the front desk shakes their strategy up.
Center
I made the center of the map big enough to feel inviting to the player, since the boss has to cover the most area to see them from far away. But I only left one paper stack to spawn so this area could double as a trap, leaving the player with a long way to run before finding any more paper.
Full Playthrough and Closing Thoughts
As my first Unreal project, I learned a lot from this project, and with that, I learned a lot of what not to do next time.
Dialogue Options — While my goal was to force the players to pay close attention to the dialogue, many chose options through trial and error, and memorized their positions, finding them too long to read. A simple way to help account for this would be to randomize the positions of the dialogue options. But the primary solution would be to use blurbs, so the player wouldn’t have to sacrifice as much time.
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Branching Narrative — The idea of branching the narrative off early on could’ve been a good way to go, but three branches that didn’t reconverge till the end was ambitiously wasteful. Many of the players only chose one path since they learned early on) which path gave them a good or medium effect. Two or three branches of three which quickly recombined would’ve been a safer way to ensure players had a variety of experiences.
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Camera View — The assets weren't made with this in mind, but the maze is better suited to a near entirely top-down view. It’s harder to see the boss appear from the bottom half of the screen with less visible from the angle.
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