ICU is a first person escape room game exploring psychiatric facilities in the USA. As an involuntarily admitted patient to a psychiatric ward, the player must navigate doctors, nurses, drugs, and other patients with only one goal in mind: get out of the hospital. You will quickly find it is not as easy to escape “ the help you need ” as it is to suffer it.
From the hotline call to the psych ward floor, the events depicted in this first-person horror game put players too close for comfort to a modern American epidemic. Choose your words carefully, embody the certifiable, and be prepared to pay up either way.
Illustrating varied scenes, dialogues, and terrors based on the lived experiences of patients undergoing psychiatric care to the most articulate degree possible, ICU spans the course of one week in a three-level psychiatric ward. As a player you will be tasked with proving your personal health and sanity to medical staff convinced of your instability - all the while being watched/judged incessantly, being fed/forced drugs, and combating the nightmares and negative thoughts anxiety and depression themselves ensure.
Unlike many escape-the-room/survival oriented games, ICU engulfs players into the complex puzzle of public healthcare, asking them to use text, gesture, timing, and endurance to find their way out of a miserable situation. Decorated in mini-games, collectables, and a series of visions both terrifying and enchanting, the gameplay reflects the experiences of psychiatric patients with a level of lucidity not present in popular representations of psychiatric facilities.
Unlike many escape-the-room/survival oriented games, ICU engulfs players into the complex puzzle of public healthcare, asking them to use text, gesture, timing, and endurance to find their way out of a miserable situation. Decorated in mini-games, collectables, and a series of visions both terrifying and enchanting, the gameplay reflects the experiences of psychiatric patients with a level of lucidity not present in popular representations of psychiatric facilities.
While this is a 3D game, the 2D design and illustration creative kit provided by Adobe made this project come to life.
Using Blender to first roughly model the 30+ characters on the ward, the UV textures were all created and edited in Adobe Photoshop.
Similarly, all widget interfaces included in the game (Menus, Dialogue screens, etc.) were made in Adobe Illustrator.
Rigged and animated in Autodesk Maya 2018, I used modified animations from Adobe's Mixamo animation index to bring a new range of movement to the models, making them scarier than I could have hoped for.
Original music mixed and mastered in Ableton Live, and packaged with Unreal Engine 4.
Responsibilities: Character Design + Story Writing + Game Design + 3D Modeling + Texturing + Rigging + Animation + Environment Design + Lighting + Artificial Intelligence + UI Programming + UMG/Widget Programming
