Introduction

Blueprint Games was founded in 2015 by James and Katie after graduating Games Technology at Bournemouth University. James took on the role of the programmer whilst I work on the art. We were joined by Andy who helped us with project management and writing the full story. Relapse will be our first project and original IP.

For the first few months James and I worked alone until we got a place in Tranzfuser, a contest run by the UK games fund. Tranzfuser gave us 10 weeks to build a prototype from scratch to showcase at EGX. We expanded the team with two part time artists Emanuel Francis and Richard Piskorz who helped with the assets for the surgery room and doctors office.

We have also recently taken four undergraduates, Dave, Guy, Sam and Gabriel, from Bournemouth University for their placement year who will be helping us in the coming months.

We have more in depth profiles on our website for each team members.

Relapse

My final year project and dissertation was on the Psychology of Fear in Video Games; I wanted to find a recipe for fear. This included hooking people up to blood pressure and heart rate monitors and recording their reactions to different types of horror games.

I then took my findings and created a crude prototype using Unreal Engine 4 to test my hypothesis, this was the first build of Relapse. After receiving a good response from the Festival of Design and Innovation James and I decided to continue the project on a larger scale. We incorporated puzzles to bump up the tension and also because my favorite childhood games included Grim Fandango, Monkey Island and Myst. I wanted to make a game I would want to play.

Plot and characterization is also very important to us. We want to recreate the feeling of helplessness and dread of Franz Kafka’s novels. We have a set of golden rules we measure ourselves against – one of which is that everything must happen for a reason. There will be no random unexplained events just to get cheap scares; everything builds up slowly and for players that are interested there will be a back story and narrative about the history of Victorian Insane Asylums to discover – both from the perspective of the patients and the staff. Some horrific things happened in these places when you judge from today’s standards. However, almost universally the staff were doing what they thought was right for the patients.

Environment Design

During my dissertation research I realized that old buildings and clichés work better in horror games as we already associate these locations with fear or danger. We set the game within a UK insane asylum. We’ve had some backlash on the choice of setting due to its overuse in video games but our reasoning behind this is because we wanted multiple environments to work with…

UK Insane asylums functioned as small cities, this gives us the flexibility to include many different types of rooms and keep each section of the game fresh and environmentally interesting. It won’t just be endless wards or surgery rooms, but also include a library, clock tower, water tower, residential staff housing, art rooms, kitchens, greenhouses and farms and more.

We’ve also included optional interactive flash back sequences for notes. In early tests people found reading the notes tiresome, now when you read a note you are transported back in time to “witness” the events of the note unfold. This means all our assets are textured twice to show when the asylum was still in use during these flashbacks.

Hidden rooms are also in the asylum, with optional locations and puzzles we hope this adds replayability to the player as they unlock the mystery behind the antagonist and the location. Clues like video tapes, items and notes will be left behind by the antagonists previous victims giving you the chance to unlock these new areas.

Pipeline

Here are some speed sculpt videos for some of the games assets, some videos are old so the pipeline shown in them is outdated, our most recent example of our pipeline is the suitcase speed sculpt: