Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire
Summary: "In this single-player jumpscare VR horror game, players slay powerful vampires by carefully cracking open their coffins and disarming their traps with the guidance of an ancient, mystical book."
Project Details
Game built for: Schell Games
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Platform: Meta Quest 2 & 3
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Genre: Horror
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Team size: ~20
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Game Engine: Unreal Engine 4
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Time on project: April 2022 - April 2024
My roles and responsibilities:
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Level Lead: Owned the designs for several levels, designing and implementing puzzles that followed the intended difficulty curve and while also themed around the narrative of the vampire in each level
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Gameplay and Content Design: Designed, prototyped, and iterated on base puzzle mechanics to be reused and expanded upon across all 10 levels of the game. Worked within a pod structure with an engineer and artist to bring features to life.
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Prototyping Team Lead: During the Concept and Feasibility phase of this project, I lead the teams prototyping various puzzle mechanics to both find the fun and discover gameplay that fit the tone of the game.
Website:
Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire on the Schell Games Website
Developer Commentary Trailer that I am featured in.
Encounter 8 coffin interior design, as seen in the shipped game. Features tripwires to cut and beams to deactivate, as well as a "waking idol". This character is a queen, so the tripwire attachments above her head are arranged to resemble a crown. The beam weaves around and through the tripwire pattern.
Development challenge: Tuning the difficulty curve of this one. It's the 3rd-to-last level, so it needed to be a challenge, without being frustrating. There is also an element of physical fatigue that needed to be accounted for, so making sure to give the player tasks that were less taxing was important.
Encounter 7 coffin exterior design, as seen in the shipped game. This puzzle is an iteration on previously-introduced elements of locks and keys and the "waking idol" behind the cage. Players need to match the correct key patterns in order to remove the hanging doll and unlock the coffin lid.
Development challenges: Figuring out the sweet spot of complexity in pattern designs for players to be able to match the keys to the locks.
