Overview / Usage

Flicker of Hope is a dark stealth horror game where you play as a little cute candle named Jean Wick. Jean is attempting to light an old cathedral devastated by a plague in an attempt to bring it back to what it once was by filling it with light and hope. You can use Jean’s douter and a mix of waxy tricks to avoid being detected by Mara, a nun who succumbed to despair as she tried to heal the overwhelming tides of plague victims, and the Legiones, giant insects who feast on the dead. Travel deep into the darkness to bring the world back to the light, or die trying.

Flicker of Hope was developed by Studio Whip, a team of students at Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA), over the course of eight months. The team pushed their limits by developing a main character that was not only the player’s only light source but also shrunk in size while playing, just as a real candle would. Studio Whip _has released Flicker of Hope_ on Steam and have received international attention, breaking 100,000 downloads with a 94% review rating on Steam.

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Development Team

Project Managers: Zachary Karlins, Kelby Martin

Lead Game Design: Patrick Wert

Technical Designers: Andres Figueroa, Ross Winters

Level Design Team: Mikael Romo, Tho Tran

Programming Lead: Belanna Marconi

Programming Team: Andrew Chok, Sloan Kiechel

Art Lead: Joseph Denike

Environment Artist Team: Niara Clay, Paxton Klotz, Heather Steffani

Technical Artists: Aria Hight, Thi Tran

Animation Team: Kenneth Morrison, Hannah Shea

Methodology / Approach

Production Processes

Studio Whip was managed using a Hybrid Development Methodology. During the initial design and experimentation phase we used a combination of the Protype and Scrum methodologies. This allowed the team to quickly turn out new designs and iterate on those designs to ensure we had what truly fit our vision best. When we got into Pre-Production, the team was on a strict Scrum routine. During this time, we followed select Scrum rituals that fit well with the team and did not distract them from their focus on creating content. As the team started to enter Production, we switched to a hybrid of Scrum and Critical Path Methodologies. This involved finding the team’s critical path and using that information to inform decisions during Sprint Planning. This helped us focus on the longest dependency chain in the project at any given time, preventing us from leaving something important unfinished at the end of the project. When the team entered Alpha, we switched our process to a KanBan methodology. We knew that Alpha would be a lot of firefighting and doing our best to complete our list of bugs, and KanBan allows for this to be done more efficiently than a Scrum Methodology.

As a team we tracked all our work using Jira and Google Sheets. In Jira we had a specialized workflow that allowed our team to set tasks to a review state. This allowed our leads to see progress on a developer level. The leads reviewed the work that each developer did throughout the week to ensure that their work met the standards the team set at the beginning of the project. This, along with the many other processes we used, allowed the team to uphold a level of quality that can be clearly seen throughout the game.

Design

In our initial design meetings, we threw many unique ideas at the wall looking for what would suit the specific makeup of our team the best. For example, while we had a weakness in 3D character art, we had plenty of animators, which created a challenge in keeping the animators busy without overwhelming the 3D artists. With this team composition in mind, we eventually arrived at the idea of playing as a candle, which we thought could be a very simple, yet charming, character concept. From there, we asked ourselves what genre of game would have a candle as a protagonist, what sort of narrative a candle could tell, and what mechanics could be cute and unique using a candle character.

When considering the genre, the one thing we could all easily visualize was our candle protagonist alone and in the dark. Because of this, we landed on a stealth game with horror beats. The idea of darkness led naturally to stealth, which could make our protagonist feel cute and small in contrast to the darker setting.

For the narrative, we quickly landed on the idea that the game would be about spreading hope. This candle would be alone, but it had hope. And with that hope it could light the cathedral up candle by candle as that hope proliferated, much like it does in our everyday lives. We chose a church because we felt that many people search for hope in churches. In addition, candles happen to be very prolific in cathedrals. We then created a singular antagonist who was as opposite from our cute hopeful candle as possible. Then the rest fell into place.

As far as mechanics were concerned, we chose to focus on mechanics that would heighten the stress felt through our horror experience, use wax and fire creatively, and overall scare the player. One such mechanic involved the antagonist (Mara) tracking drips of wax left behind by our protagonist (Jean), as well as being able to detect Jean by seeing the light his flame produces. In addition, Jean will melt and die over time without pools of wax with which to replenish his wax. These are just a few of many mechanics designed using similar logic. Finally, the buddy system was the main mechanic we wanted to implement. This system would give power to the player and provide a unique stealth experience by making players play as both decoy and escapee simultaneously. Throughout the development of Flicker of Hope we did our best to design with the player at the forefront, and we truly believe we have a unique, fun experience that you will not find anywhere else.

Technologies Used

Engineering Tools: Visual Studio, UE4, Perforce

Art Tools: Houdini, Maya, Substance Painter, Zbrush, Photoshop, Illustrator

Production Tools: Jira, Zoho BugTracker, Google Sheets, Excel, Google Forms, Slack

Other links

• Steam Download

Collaborators