Goals :
Period :
May - June 2025
Engine:
A two-month team project, System Leak is an escape game set in a futuristic prison. At regular intervals, the prison’s anti-escape system triggers acid rains. To escape, the player must avoid them while solving environmental puzzles and mini-games.
Jean-Philippe Ménier: Game Design, Programmation
Visual Scripting, Sound Design
Lucas Brouillard: Game Design, Programmation Visual Scripting, Level Design
Tom Leguenec: 3D Art, Texturing, Game Menu, Lighting
Ulysse Vanier: 3D Art, Texturing, Level Art, VFX
Nathanael Francez: 3D Art, Texturing, Level Art, VFX
System Leak's game concept was directly inspired by the film Escape Room: Tournament of Champions. In one scene, three people are trapped in a room and must solve puzzles before a timer runs out. When at zero, it triggers acid rain. For the prisonners, finding the answer to a puzzle unlocks a shelter that protects then from the rain until they can escape.
Game Design
Although our concept is similar to the film, we sought to innovate in several ways:
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First, in the uses of the rain, which varies between levels. In the first, it rains everywhere with a single shelter accessible at all times. The second one is divided into three zones, each with a single shelter that can be used only once. The rain will then fall first in zone 1, then in zones 1 and 2, and finally throughout all the level.
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Second in the integration of two mini-games, allowing for a variety of gameplay instead of just environmental puzzles.
In System Leak, not only do players have to solve puzzles, but they're also under pressure. Avoiding misunderstandings to the player while learning the game was a real challenge. Overall,
I think (I hope) we managed to give the player exactly the information they needed at the right time, all while avoiding any interruptions during the game.
Concept
Impulse Shooter is a shooting game that isboth an FPS and a TPS. Each time the player fires, the perspective switches from the view of the shooter to the back of the projectile. The player then has the ability to give asecond projectile impulse in the direction of his choice.
The game level takes place ina wide hallway including targets, transparent walls and boosters, areprocedurally generated. The boosters are objects which, in contact with the player's projectile, allow him an additional impulse.
In Impulse Shooter, players must use precision and strategy to eliminate all targets with an allotted number of impulses.
Note: For the rest of this page, I decided to explain the game elements where, aside from the visuals, I did all the work.
Hacking Mini-Game
Definitely the biggest piece of System Leak I've worked on entirely.
The player controls the blue square from left to right. The objective is to connect it with the green rectangle by making a blue bar grow towards it.
To do this, you have to align the two squares, but the bar will shrink every second they are not. Three elements complicate this task :
1) The blue square will be pulled to the left or right, depending on where
the up arrow is pointing. Initially, I intended to display a loading bar to warn the player of when
the change of direction happens.
But this would have made the game too visually complex for the player, which wouldn't necessarily have helped.
2) From the bottom of the screen, red insects will periodically rise vertically. If one of them comes into contact with the blue square, the loading bar decreases.
3) The green square changes direction randomly. This was the most difficult element to program. I used a loop that made the square go back and forth, and also changing its direction randomly.
When you interact with the hacking terminal, the camera changes to all the elements of the mini-game. Since time management is crucial in System Leak, we didn't want to change the scene in order to maintain maximum fluidity. Moreover, the mini-game doesn't interrupt the clock timer and you can still hear it (a little less loudly) while hacking.
Tower Mini-Game
This mini-game is quite basic, the generator activates 3 small towers composed of 3 cubes that rotate on themselves. By approaching a tower, a combination of symbols appears on it. The player can then interact with the tower to stop each cube on the correct side, in front of him. Each completed turn changes one of the 3 red colors of the generator to blue. Completing all of them unlocks the next level for the player.
I coded this system on Unreal that compares the rotation angle of each cube based on several intervals. If the rotation of the stopped cube is in the correct interval, it aligns perfectly with the tower before being validated. During this short time, the player can no longer interact with the tower.
As with the hacking mini-game, all elements were easily linked to a game manager in the level scene. The manager was invisible in the scene but grouped all the variables related to the difficulty of the mini-game. This made balancing and implementation easier.
Sound Design
Each sound in the game went through four stages:
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Searching for sounds online in free audio libraries
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Editing/mixing sounds using Audacity
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Validation by the team
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Integration into the game code
The majority of sounds were played in 2D or independently of the distance from their source.
Others, however, are spatialized. This is the case for the rotation of the tower cubes and the continuous sound of the force fields. I found this to be a discreet but interesting addition to enhance the game's atmosphere.
I was keen to have a good mix with the game's sounds. That's why the volume of each piece of music or sound effect was adjustable in an audio manager, an invisible object placed in the level's scene. I was also pleased to see that there was no negative feedback about the sound after playtests, even when I asked.