Haunted Jarvis Center

This experience borrows from Slenderman, PT, Five Nights at Freddys, and SCP: Containment breach. The major influence is PT and SCP. This is a VR or FPS experience.

HIGH LEVEL GAME OVERVIEW

Play:

• Player begins in the back room area.
• There are monitors that monitor every room of the Center.
• The player has a monitor or clipboard that assigns some tasks.
• The player has to go from the back area to the front to resolve tasks. Then come to the back area to close them out.
• Tasks include fixing machines (timed task with a progression ui), moving things around. Finding things, flipping switches, plugging and unplugging things.
• With each pass through the main area, things get weirder and scarier.

Sample events:

• Shapes moving in the distance as the space gets darker.
• Lights flickering on and off.
• Banging on closet door.
• Doors opening and closing by themselves.
• Shadows appearing in the distance fog of the area outside the Jarvis Center.
• Voices and sounds coming from rooms that disappear when the player gets there.
• Strange things appearing on monitors.

Eventually a presence appears and there are a few things the player must do to stop it from advancing.

Monitors turn on displaying signs and symbols for the ritual and the player has to rush to disable them all before the presence fully manifests. If it fully manifests, then it’s game over.

Asset needed:

• Trappings for the collaboration center. We need to model and populate static meshes to build out the space.
• Space refinement: I have a blockout but it needs to be refined to ore closely resemble Jarvis.

Mechanics:

• Task list (quests) that can be resolved and checked off.
• Task resolutions is either flipping a switch;, a timed progress bar that says what you’re doing; or moving something into proper proximity with something else.
• In the early part of the game. Each pass will see chairs or table randomly out of place. Eventually the player must put these items back in proper alignment.
• Monitors that receive a video feed from various security cameras.
• Interior materials that display a range from pristine Jarvis center to tainted Jarvis center.
• Lots of incidental audio and background music.

DESIGN

The player is a member of the tech support team who winds up pulling an overnight shift as  systems are being re-imaged and the whole Jarvis center is being brought back online after a major power outage hits the school and leaves much of the center a technical mess.

Section 01:Normalcy

When the game opens the player is in a small tech support office that is in a back corridor behind the Jarvis Center.  They’ve just been awakened from dozing off by an incoming message.In this office they receive messages and conversations with their administrator. The convo’s can be dialogs ui that plays out much like info dumps in a game of Metal Gear.

We’ll talk more about how these dialogs and communications play out later.

After getting the first message and accepting the task, the player leaves and has to go into a lon corridor that winds around and exits into the Jarvis Center Proper.

Upon first coming into the Jarvis Center the player sees a mostly dark center and all they have to do is start getting certain machines up and running.

Section 1 Tasks

• Turn on the lights.
• Turn on the big screen.
• Turn on the computers in the VR space.
• Turn on the computers in the lab.

Section 02: Strange things

Once back in the security area the player’s connection to admin will be reset. The admin will give the player new tasks. The tasks will center around investigating what is going on with the broken machines and monitors.

Section 2 Tasks

• Run diagnostics on the computers..
• Replace hard drive
• Replace Circuitboard on big monitor.
• Install antivirus software
• Replace keyboard
• Replace lightbulbs
• Check the zoom systems on the classroom monitors.

Each of these tasks will require the player to make a circuit from tech room to the affected Upon turning on the various spaces, certain machines will be obviously not coming on. This will prompt a message from admin that on their end they’re seeing multiple machines that need fixing. The player will be prompted to come back to the security area. In the middle of the conversation the conversation will fall to static.

machine. As the player cycles through weird things will start to happen. At first it’s barely noticeable. It’ll be basically every time the player comes into this space, something is slightly wrong. Chairs will be in different places. Lights will be off when they should be on. This escalates until we hear strange sounds and eventually something actually moves.

Section 2 Haunts

These are all happening as the player is traveling the circuit and/or while the player is performing tasks. In most cases they are happening outside of the range of the player’s perceptions. After a couple tasks, the player begins to hear some of the sounds listed below. As the last tasks are coming to completion is when the player sees a chair move or has an interaction with a door and a knocking.. 

• A chair (or chairs) is out of place.
• The lights in the VR room are off.
• The lights in the Classroom are off.
• The storage door is open.
• An office door is open.
• A computer is on the floor.
• A light that should be off. turns on.
• A light that is on turns off.
• The player hears footsteps in another room.
• The player here’s someone call out “is anyone there?” from another room. But no one’s there when they go to look.
• The big monitor starts playing loud static.
• There is a knock on a door (office or storage) from the other side.
• The player just catches sight of a chair moving.
• Seeing something happen behind you while looking at yourself on a zoom monitor.

The final interaction of this section happens when the player returns to the tech area. With the door closed behind them, there is a knocking on the door. It starts softly and grows in intensity until it is super loud. Then the lights in the hall and the tech room go off. The backup UPS lights in the tech room and the corridor come on, bathing everything in a red glow.

Section 03: Haunting

Dialog plays between the player and the admin. The player character says something weird is going on with the lights and they’re hearing loud sounds. The voice says they don’t see anything in the system and the sounds are probably just the pipes. The player is given instructions to install some things and arrange some things.

Section 3 Tasks

• Fix a circuit breaker in the corridor.
• Put the big screen into receiving a different source channel.
• Turn off the monitors in the classrooms.
• Go into the closet and get some candles. Place them at various locations around the center.
• Install a new os on various computers.
• Connect two classroom monitors to a zoom call to make sure they can communicate

Section 3 Haunts

As the player is doing the earlier tasks they begin to catch sight of an apparition and begin hearing whispers and voices.

• The apparition appears in flashes in the corridor but doesn’t make contact.
• The player sees the apparition at a distance or beyond walls and barriers.
• Doors begin to open and close.
• Object fly at the player
• Warnings appear on the screens that they’ve been told to cleanse or shut down.
• It all could be threatening but it could be a warning of some sort.
• Seeing someone in the zoom monitor from another room.

At the end of this stage (after all the candles have been placed) the lights go out and the apparition begins to wander the space and the player must avoid it by hiding in offices and the closet and make their way back to the tech area. If the player gets caught by the apparition (we have to decide what “caught” means) the camera fades to white and then the game begins again with the player seeming to awaken from dozing off. If they make it back to the tech office things get crazy.

Section 4:Breach

The player gets back to the tech room and most of the environment has gone dark. There is a dialog between the PC and the admin about the apparition and the crazy stuff. The admin tries to hadwave it and tell the PC to avoid the apparition at all costs and that the only way to deal with it is to do a banishment. The player is told that something is happening the Center was built as a stopgap for an invading force and that the apparition is breaking the barriers an if it isn’t banished it will bring ruin to everything. The delivery of this is scattered and with static and the voice of the apparition breaks through from time to time. The player is told how to stop this which they must do while not getting caught by the apparition.

Section 4 Tasks.

Collect 5 objects that are scattered across the space.

• A stuffed Dibs doll.
• A picture of St. Vincent
• A manual of social service
• A teacher’s notebook
• A set of keys to unlock the doors.

Take them to a room in the back area that has just appeared. That room has a stone censer. Place the items in the stone censer and they will be destroyed.

Section 4 Hauntings

The apparition is fully corporeal and roaming about the space. It screams stop and charges at the PC whenever it sees them. The player must dodge and out maneuver it. If it ever catches the player the screen fades to white and it all starts again with the player waking up at their desk.

When it comes time to put the objects in the censer, the player can do so and the apparition is slowly breaking into the room. If the player puts the stuff in the censer, the apparition screams you have doomed us all and fades away. Then the room crumbles away and everything drops into the void. The world has ended. Thanks.

The player can turn and instead let the apparition in and give the stuff to her. The lights come back on and she becomes a thing of light and thanks the player for their service to the world. They have insured that compassion and education have been preserved in the world. The voice in of the administrator breaks into static as it screams. Everything turns to white and the player awakens at their desk with a message from their administrator to go home and have a good rest and we have a closing sequence of the player character walking off and closing the door. We can see the apparition reflected in the glass.

DIALOGS AND NARRATIVE

Info is passed to the player in a few different ways.

There are the big Metal Gear style dialogs that play out on the big screen of the tech room. This is basically a zoom conversation but neither participant is actually showing video. This might be overkill and too much of a conceit to pull off but it might be nice to have some record video in the beginning and then just say that there are internet issues later and it’s just a talking head.

The second is via messaging on their phone. Every now and then a ui will be brought up that looks like discord on a phone and the player gets to read message bubbles and respond via a set of dialog options.

Finally, the player has a walkie-talkie and on occasion they’ll do direct communications on that. This will sound off as the player completes tasks and the end of every section is usually a walkie-talkie convo that sends them back to the tech room to get new instructions on the big screen.

There are two admins, The original admin that the player starts talking to and a deceiver spirit that is trying to trick them into destroying the world. The switch happens during section 01. Narrative design would have to figure out how to make the voice of the second admin sound reasonable at the beginning and shift to something a bit suspect as we get to the end. We want the player to make a choice between blindly following orders and listening to fear based propaganda and thinking for themselves and making a positive choice.

Similarly with the apparition we want it to be terrifying but have the fear of it become questionable after a bit.

Some of this will require environmental design in the haunts.

Design work will need to be done on the narrative and data structures to get the narrative into the game. This is the work of the narrative designers. They will also need to work with UI designers to make all this work seamlessly. 

ENVIRONMENTAL NEEDS

The Jarvis Collaboration Center is a large beautiful space. We have been working with an elegant blockout but it needs to actually be modeled correctly and all of our placeholder assets need to be replaced with correctly, a proportionately modeled, furniture and computers to populate the space. This includes light fixtures and ceiling fixtures, pipes and doors, and sundry little items like speakers and bits of academic evidence that shows that people are using the space.

We will need art to go on the moving whiteboards and things to display on screens. Modelers need to be competent and confident in their skills and able to push out assets quickly. The modeling of the space shouldn’t take more than a week or two and a given piece of furniture shouldn’t take more than a day (two at most for really complex furniture).

BUILDING PACE

Building the pace of the game will require some blueprint scripting. While we have the wonderful trigger boxes that can be used to set off the sequences, not all sequences should work this way. There needs to be a balance between the auto events and events that are matched/tied to particular tasks. Otherwise the story won’t work. 

The apparition isn’t an arbitrary boogieman, it is actually trying to stop the player from making a terrible mistake. So the scripting will center around building out this pace and timing the scares with the tasks and the dialog and info dumps. 

SilentHill: PT is our target reference game and that is a game full of hand scripted moments. It isn’t randomized.

Blueprint Scripters and Programmers will need to work closely to create this experience. Game designers will spend a lot of time in the sequencer. They will also need to spend some time with lighting and some particles. They will work with the artists to change the look and feel of the space from a clean Jarvis in the beginning to a haunted, deteriorating Jarvis by sections 4 and 5.

Designers will need to spend a lot of time storyboarding their sequences and events and breaking down the flow of tasks on paper before implementing them in the engine.

Programmers will continually work with artists and designers to refine pipelines and tools so that our frame rate is reasonable and our look is consistent.

Designers and programmers must always be working and thinking modularly.

We may need multiple materials for many objects and especially the walls so that we can stain them and make them feel infected over time.

CORE PLAYER ACTIONS

The core of the game is a VR walkabout. So the player can travel slowly from place to place (No teleporting). They can look about with their head and we can use look line traces to activate certain events.

They have objects they can pick up and move with their VR hands. 

Doors can be pushed open but they always close behind the player or the player can close them. Locked doors will require keys or cards to get through. The Hallway doors are unidirectional. They only allow passage in one direction. We can tell the player that in an early info dump. That once they go through one of those doors, they have to go all the way around to go through again.

Tasks will have popup progress UI that lets you know when you’re doing a long task like installing software or running diagnostics on a computer. During these times there are haunts that can go off that might cause the player to interrupt to investigate and have to start over.

“Death” starts the game over with the player awakening from a dream, stuck in a continuous loop.

AUDIO

Sound will be an important part of this experience. We need to make sure that we are making good use of positional audio. Haunts should typically have some sound associated and that sound should have positionality. We should have the player being drawn to locations and triggers using the audio strategically.

2D audio is reserved for communications and background music and environmental ambience.

Recent Edits and updates

KH01

HJ Section 1 Walkthrough

The player starts off outside the doors of the jarvis center, the players movement is constricted to a small space in front of the doors

• Let the player scan themselves in from their belt

Through the glass they can see the standing whiteboard/sign, it has instructions written on it for the player (written to the employee / character)

It tells them to look down at their toolbelt to find an ID they can grab by selecting with their hand and using [grab button], use to unlock the doors by using the scanner located to the right of the doors, and put back on their belt by holding it close to the belt and releasing [grab button]. it also has a drawn map of the jarvis center telling the player how to navigate to the back door and task room to get their task tracking device and more instructions

• When the player is holding on to the ID it goes in to a fixed “scanning” position, to unlock the doors they need to slide it fully through a scanner while holding it
  • Could use physics if possible
  • If not physics, if the player holds the ID close enough to the center of the scanner it pulls the ID and makes it so the players only option is to now pull down and finish the scan (or let go and drop the card?)
• Scanner has a red light (when it is able to be unlocked), turns green when unlocked and is off if the player cannot unlock it yet

After getting in as they are walking to the door in the back room they see:

• Front Room
  • The big screen in the main room is on and displaying something while making some noise, two chairs are clearly out of place
• Main Hall
  • A light is on in one of the study rooms, stuff is also written on a white board in there
  • Light is off but computer monitors are on in VR room
  • Light is on in classroom
• Back Room
  • Some of the computer monitors are on
  • Light is on in Josh’s room
  • Stuff is written on big white board on the back wall
  • There is garbage on the kitchen counter

Player scans through back door then into the task room

In task room: (door locks behind player)

• Desk with openable drawer on each side
• Some sort of docking device on desk
• Screen on wall above desk that displays instructions

The first instructions on the screen tell the player to open the drawer on the left and take out the device inside (right drawer is locked)

After grabbing the device the instructions now tell the player to complete the tasks on the device then dock is on the station (on the desk)

The tasks displayed on the device are

• Grab white board eraser from right drawer of desk
  • When the player grabs the eraser it snaps to a fixes “erasing” position
• Equip to tool belt
  • When held near belt and released it snaps into correct place

When second task is complete the device displays something prompting the user to dock it / place on dock

If the user places the device on the doc and lets go the large display says tasks complete, loading new tasks do not touch the device

After a second the screen then says new tasks loaded, retrieve the device and complete tasks

The player now has the first set of tasks, they are grouped into the 3 locations of the jarvis center (front room, main hall, back room)

• They have to finish all the tasks in one area to move onto the next, in same order as above

First set of tasks:

• Front room
  • Turn off big screen
    • On the bottom right of the screen there is a big red button that when the player pushed in fully turns off the screen
  • Put furniture back
    • Two chairs are very out of place and can be moved around by the player, when moved to their correct spots task completes
• Main hall
  • Clean white boards in all rooms (displays number left in main hall)
    • Uses white board system and decreases number when a board is fully cleaned
  • Turn of lights in all rooms (displays number left in main hall)
    • Side rooms with lights (vr room, classroom, studyroom) have tactile switch to control light, if light in the room is on they can use their hand to push the switch down and turn off the light
  • Turn off monitors in all rooms (displays number left in main hall)
    • Monitors that are on display something on the screen and illuminate, there is a red button on the bottom right of the monitor to turn it off (like big screen)
• Back room
  • Turn of all monitors
  • Clean white board
  • Turn off lights in all rooms
  • Clean counters and empty fridge (displays # left)
    • There are garbage objects on the kitchen counters and inside the fridge, the player can grab them and drop/throw them in a waste bin to throw them out (basketball hoop on bin)
    • To open the fridge there is a tactile handle like on the doors

After completing the final task in the back room the haunt level is increased to 1 and first haunt is triggered also giving the player new tasks 

The first haunt is the player hearing the big screen in the front room turn back on and chair creaking from the front room

• Task system is now updated to display the new tasks created from the haunt
• Front Room:
  • Turn off big screen
  • Put chairs back

As the player walks to the front room and while they are completing the tasks they can trigger subtle haunts that are coming from the main hallway 

• Quick light flicker as they walk through hall
• Sounds of creaking coming from hall as they complete tasks in main room

After completing main room tasks the haunt level goes up to 2 and they are updated with new tasks

• Main Hall:
  • Clean white board in study room (now dirty again with slightly weird writing / drawing)
  • Turn on monitors in VR lab (on again displaying something slightly unsettling)

While completing tasks in the main hall player can trigger some subtle haunts that are coming from the back room

• Weird noises, creeks and footsteps
• Light flickering
• When player gets close to monitors in VR room it opens the door and makes a noise

After finishing last task for main hall the haunt level goes up to 3 and task system is updated with new tasks

• Back room:
  • Turn off monitors (on again)
  • Clean white board (dirty again)
  • Clean kitchen (waste bin dumped on counter and floor)

While completing tasks player can set off haunts that now sound like they are closer / in same room

• Light flickering in main room and side rooms
  • Sometimes main light goes out for a couple second
• Doors opening / closing to side rooms
• Weird creeks / noises / footsteps happening around the player

After finishing this set of tasks they are now fully done with section 1 and the scanner to unlock the back hall door is now unlockable and the player can go dock their device