PsychoShock

Mansion First Visit

In PsychoShock the player starts off within the House of Death, a winding maze of a mansion filled with traps and a few untrustworthy characters. Armed with just a hand gun and up against an army of monsters the player must use their navigation, resource management and good aim to make it out alive and uncover the truth of the House of Death.

First Floor (Physical)

Designing a classic survival environment presented some really difficult issues when trying to design purely digitally. With rooms and hallways constantly changing digital methods of paper mapping wasn't modular enough to be able to move things around the way I needed to.
So I went out and got cardboard paper, a quark board and poster paper and started designing a modular two story map on my wall which would provide a general layout of the Mansion before detailing it in a digital format.

Second Floor (Physical)

The of the design of this map was linking two distinct East and West wings of the Mansion through the Main Hall. The West wing would be mostly sparse with a few incredibly important items while the East Wing would be a much more interconnected space with most of the content in the first visit.

Second Floor (Digital)

Here you can see the vast departure from the original physical design start to take place as well as rooms start to be added for future visits. The upper hall near the top (back) is no longer connected for the sake of the second visit no long being trivialized.

We also now see enemy and non-key item placement start to be implemented with a specific count being made to how much ammo and how many enemies there are. There's just barely enough ammo to kill every enemy except the boss (which can be ran from at the cost of a future penalty). Saving becomes key.

First Floor (Digital)

This first floor went through a lot of iteration puzzle and navigation wise. Items moved constantly and one single door kept causing major navigation issues as it made traveling to the safety of the main hall far too easy.

This door is the center door locked by that orange shield icon. originally it was opened by one of the first keys you get as I wanted to encourage exploration. However it made the game far too safe almost immediately.

First I tried making it only unlock on one side but again it opened up too early, then I tried removing it all together but that destroyed the cohesion of the house. Until finally I realized the key that's locked by now is one of the last keys you get making it a great reward for getting through most of this first visit. So I added an extra hallway that connected to the East Wing stair case and locked that door and suddenly the entire level clicked together making navigation dangerous and exciting.

Physical Map Full