RSA Project

This page showcases my RSA project, a first-person horror game inspired by Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. The game explores themes of loss, adventure, and personal growth.

Download RSA Case Study

Download RSA Brief

Why This Project Was Needed

This project was needed to help bring inclusivity whilst also maintaining a way of teaching people I wanted this game to teach them how to further develop through the game, and I wanted this game to help open people to new careers and inspire them to learn what it takes to create a game. This project is a must-have to help teach communities and help open and inspire those communities to learn more about games and want to possibly start a career in game development.

Understanding the Brief: A Game for Creative Communities

The RSA brief emphasised the importance of bringing creative communities together. I took this to heart by making my game a space where all players, especially those in the LGBTQ+ community, can feel welcome. The design encourages self-expression through character creation, allowing players to define their own identities within the game.

Planning

When doing my research for this project, I helped to lay out exactly what I was going to research on what day to help give me some structure and a greater understanding of what needed to be done at what time. Below is an image showing the timetable that I had created when planning out my research: Logo

Personallity Traits

This is a key part of my game; personality traits can change the game in many key aspects and the story and character. I did a great deal of research into the emotions that I wanted to be implemented into the game, and this was so I could make the game feel as authentic as possible and somewhat relatable for audiences who struggle with mental illness. The research explored what loneliness really is and how it greatly affects people, exploring anger and seeing how it can change people in many different ways these are all key aspects to my game that I wanted to be implemented.

Researching Game Development

A lot of my research was also understanding game development and getting a greater understanding of key points in successfully making a game and the workflow when it comes to game development. This helped me learn more about what it takes to make my game and what the steps entail.

Researching how games affect communities such as LGBTQ+

I also did research into how games help people from communities such as LGBTQ+ and how to implement features that make my game feel inclusive of communities such as LGBTQ+ without seeming stereotypical.

What did this research uncover

What this research uncovered was that it helped to give me a greater understanding of how to develop a game and gave me great insights into how to make key parts of my games, such as the personality traits or developing characters that are part of different communities in a less stereotypical fashion, which helped to fit into the more inclusivity aspect of the game. This research truly helped to further develop my game and also gave me a greater understanding of what is needed to make a successful game that not only appeals to people but also teaches them in some aspects and also makes a game that I hope to help open some career aspects for people through the inspiration of my game.

Project Development: Creating an Inclusive Experience

My development journey began with a focus on inclusivity. I researched how to design a game that is accessible to everyone, no matter their disabilities. I simplified the game layout and ensured that it would be easy to navigate for all players. I also looked into how major companies like PlayStation maintain engagement with their audience.

Multiplayer

The multiplayer element I added to this game is to help bring people closer together I thought that it would help make this gem more inclusive and also help the game become more popular and be spread around more. The idea was to make this game have local couch co-op so people can play together when in the same room but also have online multiplayer so people can play with friends across the world. This is to help make the game seem more inclusive.

UI Design: Visualizing the Game

I created UI mockups using Photoshop, focusing on the character development screen. Additionally, I designed a villain to help show what the monster in the game could potentially look like in the game. I also did a mockup of a storyboard to further showcase what the game may look like and how it would play out.

Character Customization: Empowering Players

One of the core features of my game is character customisation. Inspired by games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Skyrim, players can design their characters by selecting clothing, hairstyles, and facial features. The game also includes a "personality trait" system, allowing players to customise how their character behaves and interacts with the game world. This feature leads to varying challenges, villains, and character emotions based on the player's choices.

UI Drawings

This is an early sketch model of what the UI design for my character model is based on as you can see the blocks on the left to represent the choosing of the clothes. I had not thought of personallity traits at this point as it was a very early development process but this is what I based my whole design on. The Personallity traits was something that I implemented later after coming up with the idea of trying to add another level of depth to the character by implementing a feature of where the characters could decide what the character feels and thinks and decide who this person is by choosing there personallity.

UI Character design

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This is an early design of what I want my UI to look like when designing your character. As stated, it is a very early design of what it would look like there will be many key features implemented later on to help flesh out the UI and make it simpler for my audience to navigate through. There will be many different key features added to this later on, such as hair, face colours, sex and much more, to help flesh out the audience's character even further and also help make the character design seem more inclusive. I have also added personality traits, which, as I have explained before, will be a key feature of the game and can drastically change your character and the story.

AI UI Character design

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This is an upgraded version of what my UI design for character design would look like. This was created through AI and is not a 100% accurate representation of what the game's UI for character design will look like, but it helps give me an understanding of what I would look like and what I would want to design it to look like. There are many different features in this new design, such as there will be colour sliders and circles to make your clothes the exact colour you would like, there are also personality traits for you to choose from down below. The bars below the personality traits I would implement into being a place where you can write your character's name.

Monster Drawings

These are drawings of the characters that i had done before deciding to make them through photoshop and procreate these images are monster designs that are very loosely based on images of monsters I had seen on the internet that helped to inspire me to create these monster based on emotions such as anger and regret.They are related the next images that you see down below as those are a more polished version with more colour and a more apppealing visual representation of what they could possibly look like if implemented into a real game but a very early developed version not a fully fleged design.

Monster Design

This is an idea as to what a character design that I have sketched would look like it is a very early design, but this is my idea of what a monster for my game could potentially look like. This monster would be a representation of Regret, and this monster would only appear if you had chosen the personality trait of Regret, this is very simply meant to portray a villain in the story. I have based these characters' look off of an image that I saw on Pinterest, but I added my unique twist on it as the image found on the internet had no sharp white objects sticking out of its back like my sketch I added those to my sketch to help make the creature seem more disfigured, those white objects are meant to be his spine protruding from his back, I thought that it would help to make the drawing and creature stand out more.

Storyboard

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When researching, I also learnt that storyboards are a vital part of game development, so I created a small mockup of a storyboard that I had to create. Although the drawings are simple, here I am trying to show how my game would play out a bit. The images show the game's character looking over a wall in the first scene and then walking down some stairs with an arrow, teaching the audience where to navigate. There is a drawing of a baseball bat with information around it telling and teaching the audience to pick up the baseball bat and what buttons to press, such as telling you to press A to pick up the baseball bat and, in the final card, teaching you to press X to defend yourself. I have highlighted these actions as an annotation to highlight how important it is to have direction and teach people what to do in the game and help navigate them.

Feedback through Google Forms

To ensure my game met player expectations, I created a Google Form to help gather feedback. The responses helped me identify areas of improvement, from helping me make this game fit into my RSA Brief better to ensuring the final product resonates with the audience.

How my Google Form Feedback made a difference.

When originally developing, I planned for it to be a game with no real teaching elements or multiplayer elements at all, but then when I got the feedback from my audience, though mostly positive, there was one element of the feedback that I didn't find to be too positive and that was the feedback on whether my audience thought that this fit into my RSA brief at all that is why I changed the game so it would have a teaching element and included a multiplayer element and explained further in my RSA Case Study how I have hoped that this game helped open new careers for my audience help to make this game fit more into the RSA Brief.

Getting a greater understanding of the Brief: A Game for teaching Communities

After the feedback from my classmates through the Google Form that I had shared with the class and seeing that they did not believe that my idea fit into the RSA Brief very well, I decided to go back and re-read my RSA Brief to help get a greater understanding of what needed to be done to help make this work seem as if though it could fit into my RSA Brief better. When looking over the brief again, I saw that this was not just about making something inclusive to all communities but could also help teach them in some aspects, and that is why I developed it.

Playtesting: Refining the Experience

I decided that playtesting would be a good way to help get feedback from my audience as I believed that getting feedback after the game had been fully developed would truly help me learn what could be greatly improved upon my game and hear what exactly my audience thought about my game and get a greater understanding of what they liked and disliked about my work s I could learn what to improve upon and what I should not do in the future of game development.

"Playtesting is the heart of game design. Ideas flow thick and fast for many designers, but it is only by getting them on the table in front of players that we see what we have created." - Adam Porter.

Accessibility: Ensuring Everyone Can Play

Accessibility is a top priority for my game. Features like colourblind options and psychological horror toggles ensure that players of all abilities can enjoy the game. The goal is to make sure that everyone, regardless of their physical or mental challenges, can experience the story.

“We need to make every single thing accessible to every single person with a disability.”― Stevie Wonder.

Mood Boards

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Here our some mood board s helping to showcase some of the insporation I had for my monzters designs as well as the insporation behing the UI character creation design. The monsters are images taken off of the internet that inspired me I chose these kind of monsters because I felt as if they all where a great respresentation of emotions such as the white and black one and the brown one with green clothes haveing a good representation of disgust which could later be implemented as the emotion anger and regret whilst the 3rd image of the green lizard I chose because that is I how imagined envy would look like if manifisted into a monster. The character creation designs was inspired by various different games these images are taken from games whith character creation designs such as Baldurs Gate 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077.

PlayStation Blog

I also did some research into blogs by looking at Playstation Blog as Playstation is a company that I am very familiar with and interested in I did this to help give me a greater understanding of what it looked like to keep audiences updated with game development and news about our company and anything that may appeal to your audience. I looked into this as I believed that it would be a good idea to interact with my audience when developing my game and tell them how the development of the game is going and keep them updated with any news that I feel is worth showing.

Link to PlayStation Blog: Visit PlayStation Blog

Reddit

I also looked into Reddit a bit to help see what the general public considers to make a game great and get a greater understanding of what I could implement into my game to make it an enjoyable experience for my audience. There was a Reddit post that I looked at that was titled What makes a good game? I read the comments of this post to see what people thought made a game so great so I could then implement some of these ideas into my games. Some of the comments towards this post stated that what makes a good game is challenge; the game must be engaging and creative with my understanding of what people like most in games, I can then find a way to make my game stand out by implementing those ideas in my game.

Link to the Reddit Post: Visit Reddit