Incrementum

Incrementum is a small horror FPS being developed as a university project by a team of four.

Concept statement

A parasitic fungus has invaded your space station and transformed your crewmates, leaving you as the sole survivor. You must scavenge the station for ammunition and use it in whatever way you can to drive back the parasite and destroy it at its source.

The core gameplay revolves around the theme of change. Our team fit the theme into the game via the main weapon used by the player, which can change the type of ammunition it fires to suit different situations.

The team and our roles

• Khyl (Gonburden) - Programmer
• Kaitlyn (TasteDee)  - Visuals + narrative
• Oliver (OKVirtue) - Modeller
• Finlay (Frenzy99) - Generalist + SFX/Music <<< Writing this devlog

First week of development

In this first week, we have been following our concept document to start working on art, gameplay and sound. The final product of this past week (shown at the end of this devlog) has laid down most of the foundations of the game.

Art

Kaitlyn has begun work on the visuals for the enemy, lighting and post-processing effects of the game. Incrementum will follow the retro PlayStation 1 aesthetic through low poly models and low resolution textures. Below is a compilation of Kaitlyn's concept art and a work-in-progress enemy model demonstrating the style we're aiming for:

Oliver has produced several environmental props for decorating the levels. At this stage they're fairly generic so that they can be reused heavily across every level. Like the enemy, they're pretty bare, but the detail will arrive with textures and shaders to complete the PS1 aesthetic. Here's a few of them so far:

Gameplay

Khyl and I (Finlay) have been creating the fundamental gameplay features for the player and enemy respectively.

Player movement is essentially complete, with the ability to walk, sprint and crouch. Crouching lets you fit under head-height obstacles or enter crawlways / vents.

Enemies have a "shortsighted" range where once they spot the player they will head towards them to attack. To ensure they're a threat despite how slow they are, the levels are mostly comprised of tight spaces, and the attack is hard to avoid if you're caught in range.

We also have other core functionality like collecting keys that open doors, pressing F to interact with objects, and health on the player and enemy.

Here is a gameplay snippet of Incrementum after week 1, this is the first portion of the first level that I'm still working on. In the final game, this is where the tutorial will take place.

Audio / Immersion

In this clip you can hear echoing footsteps, and the player's head bobs around in sync with their steps. Normally these details wouldn't be added so early on in development but we're prioritizing immersion into the horror atmosphere. In my opinion sound is more than 50% of the experience in a game like this, which is also why I've already created a few ambient tracks to test as background music, one of which can be heard in the clip above.