Details

Pestilence is a first-person stealth game in which you play as the Lord of the Pestilence, a betrayed God who seeks revenge against his brothers. To accomplish this, you will need to kill your brothers' Judges, the ruling caste of the city of Trumana. You will traverse the town's shadows as a malevolent force, using your uncanny ability to possess and sow chaos between its people.

This premise made Pestilence win the Play Station Talents award to Best Original Idea in 2023

This is my M.A. project, I pitched the idea in February and then we started development. My team and I collaboratively designed a first person stealth game from scratch and after a month of pre-production, we started prototyping in Unreal Engine 5. For most of the project I have been a Level Designer, while also using my knowledge in programming to add scripts to the world, managing the level streaming logic and setting up the save game system on the map. During the whole development I pitched the idea of Pestilence to numerous videogame journalists, companies and publishers.

Also, at the ending months of the project, I undertook the role of Producer, managing an 18 people development team using Scrum methodology.

Analysis

When we designed Pestilence, we wanted to make the player feel both powerless but a predator in the shadows. To acomplish this, we made the abilites you use throughout the game consume the host you find yourself in. This causes the player to adopt a predator mentality that causes them to lurk in the shadows in search of their next host. This is also reinforced by the fact that guards kill you in one hit and chase you down when your host is low on integrity (and it is visibly decomposing)

In one point of the game, the player goes back to a previously visited area, the market. When creating the level design of this section, I had in mind that even though it is the same space, it has to be played differently. I turned a mostly safe space into a full stealth section by changing the layout and patrols of the guards, in addition to moving some covers to add to the challenge and pathing of the level.