Best Served Cold
Best Served Cold is a first person horror experience set in a modern restaurant after closing hours. As a new kitchen hand, you must complete menial tasks to set the restaurant up for it’s operating hours the following day. However, as the shifts pass by, the restaurants sinister secret begins to reveal itself…
Project Outline
Timeline: 6 weeks
Engine: Unreal 5.3
Roles: 3D Layout Design, Mechanic Design & Implementation, Narrative Design, Environment Design.
Genre: Puzzle, Horror, Atmospheric
Responsibilities
Concepting and designing the high concept.
Facilitating playtesting and actioning feedback
Cinematics
Mechanic Design and Implementation
Level design. From greybox to set dressed environment
Sound scape design, mixing and implementation
Best Served Cold was a small personal project made in Unreal 5.3. My overall goal for this project was to make something small and polished within the horror genre, while also improving my skills with Unreal Engine 5.
In Best Served Cold, player’s take the role of a newly hired kitchen hand in a modern restaurant. The game takes place over four days Monday - Thursday. Each day begins with the player receiving a note left behind from kitchen staff outlining the tasks they need to perform. However, as the days pass more and more strange occurrences happen within the restaurant, ultimately leading to the reveal of a dark and sinister secret. The high objective for the player is to find the three keys for the locks on the cool room door to find out what is inside.
The primary mechanics of the game involve simple physics interactions where the player can pick up and manipulate objects in the environment to complete goals. The narrative of the game is mainly told through the environment, by use of lighting, prop placement and materials to convey the restaurant’s story.
Physical door interaction by dragging the mouse back and forth
One of the important design considerations for this project was the separation between the interior and exterior play spaces. I wanted the alley way area outside of the restaurants to provide a safe space for the player. I used warm lightning and a gentle city sound scape to create a welcoming feeling for the player. It was important to establish early in the game that this was a safe space and nothing horror related would happen here. By making the player have to come out into this area for some objectives I was able to feather the horror pacing as tension spikes and dips between as the player travels between the two areas. In contrast to the alley way, the interior space was designed to have a cold and sterile feeling to it by use of cooler lighting and subtle cavernous ambience. As well as this, the spaces inside the restaurant are tighter and more cluttered.
Regarding the horror elements of the game, I made extensive use of level sequences to playout and pace scripted events to create chilling moments of gameplay. Level sequences gave me very granular control over each scripted event allowing me to tweak it finely to have the impact I wanted. A good example of this is the first event the player witnesses, where a previously locked door swings open on its own, and a light flicks on inside the proceeding room. As the player approaches, a cacophony of whispers can be heard from inside the room until the player completely opens the door. A good amount of time was spent adjusting each element of this event such as the rotation speed of the door, the creaking audio, the light flicking on and the whispering to deliver a rather spooky gameplay moment.
Door swinging open event
It was important before starting development to establish a strong idea for the pacing of the horror throughout the game. The pacing controls the overall tension of a horror game throughout and needs extra time and consideration so as not to make the game so scary that players aren’t able to continue playing.
Prop interaction using Unreal physics handle
Using the above graphs I iterated on the placement and timing of scripted event and important gameplay objectives to create a steadily paced horror experience. To work within this structure of horror elements and gameplay objectives I designed a game manager that gave me the flexibility to change what tasks were being assigned to the character and when. This allowed me to build horror elements around these objectives once I established the timing and order for which each objective is to be taken on by the player. In the game manager, each objective is assigned an integer as identification number. The game manager then pulls an integer from an array of these integers to assign a gameplay task. By making the array elements public I could change which task is done when by assigning an ID integer to each spot in the array through the editor.
Based on the reactions and comments from my playtesters, I think I achieved a fairly solid and cohesive horror experience through working on this project. It taught me a lot about the value of pacing and tension, and how it effects the player experience. I think what I learned of pacing and tension during this project will be invaluable to future projects, and not just within the horror genre. I look forward to applying my new found knowledge in different contexts.