The Cosy Hotel
Year: 2024
Genre: Horror & Puzzle-Solving
POV: First Person
Type: Single Player
Platform and Engine: Windows PC & Unreal Engine 5
Team Size: 1
Duration: 5 months
Description
The Cosy Hotel is a first person horror, puzzle/maze type of game in which the player is tasked to complete puzzles and go through mazes to reach the next floor. The Cosy Hotel is one big level, a hotel which is made up of 6 different floors. After I finished with Project Shumen I wanted to carry on expanding and learning new skills within UE5 and most importantly keep improving my level design skills so I decided to create a new project. The Cosy Hotel is made up of 6 floors where on each floor apart from the ground floor (the reception) and the last floor (the player’s room) have escape rooms where the player will have to try and find keys to reach the next floor.
Level Design Goals
My goals with this project were to:
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Learn and practise in Unreal Engine 5.
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Spend more time practicing, learning and improving my level design skills.
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Learn more about blueprints by creating various of systems i.e. puzzles, cinematics and events.
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Create different floors with various of puzzles, paths and events
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Improve on my level planning
Level Planning
It was important to plan the structure of each level before I started building the blockouts. So for each level I made a layout with information on what this level was and what the player had to do to progress to the next. Throughout the process I kept making changes and because of this it made it easier for me to know and where I wanted to input the new changes.
The left image below was the first layout I designed which shows the ground floor of the hotel.
After some playtesting and decision making I decided to change and improve the layout. The reason behind this was because I felt the spacing on the ground floor felt very simple and maybe too easy to explore. I changed the layout because I wanted to make the player feel more comfortable and give them more space and areas to explore rather than just going directly from point A to point B. This level was also an introduction level to the player where they would get familiar with how the game worked and what they had to do to reach the next floor. An example of this was the puzzle they had to do to open up a safe which had a doll inside. The doll is a collection of which the player has to find on each floor to open their room.
First layout of The Reception
Improved layout of The Reception
The images below show the rest of the levels layouts I created. Click on the image for more information.
Creation Process / Testing and iteration
After finishing my layouts I started creating the blockouts. My main job as a level designer during this project was to test the blockouts of each floor and figure out what the key points, difficult areas, or disliked or well-received areas were. As this was a horror/puzzle game I had to make sure the spacing, pacing, lighting, sounds and various mechanisms were implemented in the correct way for each levels. This would then make the player's game time experience better and scarier.
Blueprints
While the main focus was the level design of the game I was also learning and using blueprints to create various of mechanisms in each floor. To do so I was learning via YouTube tutorials and these consisted of movable enemies and obstacles, custom kill volumes, save points, collectible items and puzzle creation of opening safes. I also created a menu and a pause menu.
I hope you enjoy the game! Please provide your feedback & report any bugs in the comments section on itch.io!