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CARETAKER
CARETAKER is a first-person narrative driven puzzle adventure. Playing CARETAKER it is your job to maintain the facility you find yourself in alongside the ever vigilant and intrusive A.I., OVERSEER. As CARETAKER starts to become self-aware it is your job to help them escape the facility by outsmarting and outplaying OVERSEER. Who are you? What is happening? And what do you want to do next?
My Roles
Gameplay, Narrative & Level Designer
Tools
Intended for UE5
Year
2022
A concept I pitched, but am yet to produce
CARETAKER was a concept I started working on, and later, together with one other primary team member, attempted to pitch for a project course.
While we did not manage to gather enough members for the project to be viable, there's still over 50 pages of pre-production design documentation. Thus it is not impossible that the game will be developed, as a spare time project.
Insights
Core Loop
The game play loop begins with the narrative implicitly guiding the player further into the game, introducing clues as to what’s actually going on. Eventually you will be guided into a supposed dead end. The player is not prompted to, but nonetheless has to attempt to break out, through outsmarting the OVERSEER - i.e. solve a puzzle. Which returns the player to the beginning of the loop with the narrative picking back up. This time, with OVERSEER audibly more upset with you for outplaying them.
Level Design
The levels of CARETAKER were all designed around a limited set of systemic actions. Part of the difficulty in CARETAKER is that your abilities almost never change, whereas the rooms to which you are guided will adapt to counter previous solutions.
No levels were ever developed, but there were a number of them designed and tested on paper - with great feedback!
Takeaways
While it’s a shame that the project never got into production, the pre-production experience, pitch included and failure to gather enough team members, has been great. It gave me the opportunity to pitch in front of a large audience, but also to spend plenty of time on producing design documentation before the actual production had begun. It taught me a lot about the value of simple prototypes, and careful considerations in the early stages of a project.
As this concept already has plenty of documentation, it is not unlikely that it eventually will move into production in my spare time, and thus I have chosen to omit further details. That said, in the gallery below, you can see some examples of the early sketches produced for the levels.
