Breathe
Breathe is a work-in-progress first-person survival horror game where the player clings to their life while managing their respiration.
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Main Goal
For this project, using Unreal Engine 4, I want to create an immersive first-person survival horror experience where the player has to manage their respiration in order to survive. I was inspired by the phenomenon of sleep paralysis and the human ability to manually breathe. I want to somehow use that same feeling of panic and inability to breathe to create a tense experience.
Game Design Document
The Process
To begin the ideation process, I asked myself a few questions. What do I want this game to be? What mechanics do I need to implement to do that? I want this game to be an immersive horror game about breathing. To do that, the most basic things I need are a breathing mechanic, a first-person movement system, a way to interact with the world, perhaps an item pick-up and inventory system, and the antagonist/enemy. I am currently calling the enemy the [REDACTED] since I am not sure what it is yet.
In personal experiences with sleep paralysis, there tends to also be some sort of entity. In some cases, it was a growling creature with glowing green eyes or an octopus-like being that would wrap its tentacles around me and suffocate me. I've also heard stories of a shadowy man with a fedora, a trench coat and glowing red eyes. Regardless of what it is, I need it to interact with the player to induce the player to manually breathe. With that information, I begin outlining my controls and prototyping.
This is a prototype 'breath' meter. Here is an example of auto breathing. Future UI for this meter would be something like below.
The breathing mechanic
The main mechanic to this game is breathing. It's a fun idea, but in practice, it is a challenge to implement. How will the player breathe? Through a mic? Through pressing and holding a button? How will that reflect in game? I chose to go with pressing and holding a button. At first it was a singular button hold to inhale and letting it go to exhale. I then decided using one button for inhaling, and another button for exhaling. My reasoning is that you can manually control your exhaling as well; the air does not only flow out of your lungs on its own. Using two separate inputs to breathe in and out gives me the opportunity to expand on the breathing mechanic if I need to. As a silly example, when manually breathing out, I could shoot out lasers out of my mouth to hit the enemy. Something similar, albeit much tamer, can be introduced to solve puzzles or interact with the world somehow. So far, I decided the best controls for the breathing mechanic are the left and right mouse buttons or, if using a controller, the left and right triggers. Why the triggers? Because:
The Dualsense Controller is dope
See, the triggers on the PlayStation 5's Dualsense controller are special in how they vibrate and have resistance leading to an increase in immersion. I found that it would be a perfect fit for a game like this, as it would give the player a sense of difficulty to do something as simple as breathing. Unfortunately, base Unreal Engine 4 does not have Dualsense support. But, with a little help from the internet and Paliverse and collaborators (credit for DS support in UE4 goes to them), I was able to use the resistance capability on the triggers for my game. Whether I think the game should only be played on a Dualsense controller is up to debate, but the functionality works on both Xbox and PlayStation gamepads as well as mouse and keyboard.