Shroud

Trailer

What is Shroud?

Shroud is a first person, 3D stealth horror game in which the player takes the role of Tobias, a young man suffering from anxiety and depression. Tobias decides to embark into a unique journey inside his own psyche in order to face his emotional demons and trying to find closure and peace from this state he has been into for a long time.

My experience

Shroud has been one of the hardest yet most satisfying games that I have ever worked on. With only a team of four, we managed to create a 3D pure stealth horror game.

My responsibilities in Shroud were:

Game Design: together with the rest of the team I developed the main mechanics of the game, with particular attention on the enemies behaviour and characteristics.
Project Management: manage the team in order to complete the production phase and mantain the vision and the scope of the project.
Audio implementation: implement in code the assets given to us by our sound designers for the project

One of the biggest challenges in Shroud for me was finding a way to get away from the usual schemas that most stealth games follow. With the team we wanted to give a meaning to the waiting moments that are really common to stealth games. It is from this point that coming up with an idea about the AI of the game: this is how it was decided to have three different enemies with three different senses.

On top of that it was realized how that was not enough in order to make the waiting appealing. Thus, the relationship system was introduced and developed. This system has each enemy communicate with one of the other two in order to call a new threat to the player.

This system completely changed the meaning of waiting in Shroud because the waiting now was not just a moment to read the enemies movement patterns but a moment of deconstruction of the room logic, in order to understand which is the best way to face the challenge and how to exploit the system for the players' sake.

Player feedback was another big important point in Shroud: due to the nature of the game, the player had to know exactly what is going on on the screen and use that feedback to succesfully face the challenges.
I promoted a system that relies not only on icons on top of the head of the enemies to represent each enemies' sense but on particle effects and, more importantly, on audio feedback. Thanks to the really peculiar atmosphere of the game, I had the chance to implement many different kinds of sound effects that the player had to rely on in order to understand the enemies' status.