Shortly after moving to a new state a family starts receiving letters by someone claiming to watch them in their home. Concerning as it may be, leaving is not an option for the family in their times of financial struggle so events unfold as family members deal with their situation in different ways.
6th Semester 2021, Game Design, HTW Berlin
Duration: 4 Months
Constraints: Reaching New Horizons
Team: Ryan Grimm, Meike Strippel, Roman Wiegand, Robin Zitt
Technology: Unreal Engine, Maya, Substance Painter, Adobe Photoshop, GitHub
Coaches: Prof. Susanne Brandhorst, Prof. Thomas Bremer, Timo Falcke
My Part: Visual Development, 3D Modeling & Texturing, Narrative Design, Sound Design
Fox Hollow Drive is inspired by a true crime case that happened in 2014 in New Jersey.
We did however change details to suit our story better.
After the tragic death of mom Morgan, the rest of the family is left in a financially tight spot. Anja, the now single mother of a teenage son and a young daughter, manages to buy a run down old house for
cheap. The seemingly serene and safe new home becomes increasingly uncanny as letters from a spying stalker arrive one by
one. While Anja tries to keep the situation a secret it takes a toll on her mental health and relationship with her eldest, Fabi. He is
struggling with the loss of his mother as well as the move. On top of that Fabi is going through his rebellious teenage years. Emma, his younger sister on the other hand is living in a world she created, expressing herself creatively through drawings and stories she makes up. While living in the house and exploring it in their own ways the anonymous stalker keeps a close eye on everyone and
letters get more detailed and threatening.
Our visual concept changed quite a bit in the process of creating this game. It started out as a semi-realistic style with handpainted textures and a moody but realistic color scheme and little by little turned into this washed out and faded, very desaturated concept
with less detailed textures to represent the vagueness of Emma’s remembering and retelling this traumatic story of their past. Color is primarily introduced to guide the player’s eye to important objects and otherwise used sparingly.
We modeled 3D assets after our concept art as well as reference photos we had collected in the concept phase. We made sure to stay within our simplified style while also including some amount of detail in the modeling so objects would look interesting and
recognizable even without heavy textures. Since our project time was limited we also decided to use some free assets from different sources online for objects and pieces of furniture that are more generic and can often be found in different american households.
Ryan and I designed the narrative and the characters. We split up the main events into chapters and ended up with 16 chapters. We knew that we had to decide for the one’s which are most important and show interesting parts of the story. Also we tried to include all three main characters as much as we could. In the end our game slice consists of three chapters, one played with Emma and two played with Anja. If we would want to continue with the development it would be easy for us to create new chapters because nearly all rooms in the house are already designed.
Sound plays a vital role in our game seeing as voice lines are often the main indicators of tasks the player has to complete. Ryan wrote all voice lines and together we recorded the dialogues for Emma (voiced by Ryan) and Anja (voiced by me), using the microphones we had and Audacity to record and adjust if necessary. Robin and Roman also voiced some side characters like an interviewer or a radio host. Most sounds were also recorded by us, only using a few free sounds from online libraries. This was the first time I did voice acting. It went surprisingly well and was super fun.
Since for the duration of this project Berlin was under lockdown due to Covid-19, we worked from home in our improvised home offices. To coordinate our group project we used Discord for calls, chats and task management and Miro for visual planning, collecting research Thankfully there was also a coaching system in place, allowing us to
have a video call coaching every two weeks and receive important feedback from our professors and our team coach. and everything else. In order to synchronize changes in the Unreal Engine we used GitHub.
