Lenora Fedora
A Hat-Based Survival Thriller Game
3rd Person Survival Thriller (Unity 3D) January 2021 – May 2021
Product Owner/ Lead Game Designer Team Size: 8
Responsibilites:
Documentation, Concept Design, Mechanics Design, UI Design, Level Design, Level Blockout, Lighting, Event Scripting
Overview
Lenora Fedora is a game developed for my Game Studio 2 course. As the lone designer on a team of 8, I had to handle all of the responsibilities above. Lenora Fedora is a hat-themed survival thriller game boasting "hat mechanics" that allow the player to navigate the play space by manipulating their oversized hat. See below for my contributions! Lenora Fedora is available on Itch.io now.
Design Reel
As Lenora, the player can bend the brim of their hat to fit into narrow corridors and crouch to slip under furniture. Their goal is to free their fellow hat people from the clutches of The Tall One, a harrowing figure who runs the hat shop. Once all of the hat people in the shop are saved, the player must escape without being caught. The game has 3 levels, including the tutorial, that have the player navigate various layouts of the shop.
Problem Solving - Tutorial
When designing the Tutorial, we had to find a way to introduce mechanics in an order that was digestible for the player, while avoiding large text boxes. To space out the information and allow the player to practice the mechanics in real time, we used diegetic movie / instruction posters placed on the walls of the hat shop to deliver the information within the game space.
Top-Down Blockout of Tutorial
Problem Solving - Level Navigation
The usefulness of the hat mechanics in Lenora Fedora are completely reliant on the levels presenting areas and features that can only be accessed by using said mechanics, as well as providing a use to the player when hiding from The Tall One. In the initial versions of the levels, we found that players were just running around the level more than actively using the game's stealth options. We needed the levels to allow for more player choice when navigating the level, as well as giving them opportunities to utilize their trusty hat.
Level 2
Level 3
These top-downs of levels 2 and 3 show the routes the player could walk pre-solution.
Red lines show the areas that the player can walk on freely.
Purple lines show routes that require either crouching or tucking Lenora's hat.
The Solution - Hollow Islands
My solution was to hollow out the islands we were using to break up the level. With these now hollowed, the player could use them to get to one side of the level to the other with ease. This opened up a large number of possibilities for strategy and navigation, while using the mechanics we had implemented.
Level 2
Level 3
