Scare the Crow

Scare the Crow was an Unreal Engine 5 project I worked on during late 2023. After following the (sadly short lived) series of UE tutorials by Katie Chironis, I wanted to see what I could quickly come up with using the engine with Blueprints.

I felt like working on a project based in a corfield, so the first idea that came to mind was a game where the Player has to chase after a crow that's trying to eat the corn, hence the title. I quickly moved on from that though, as moving through the cornfield, not seeing what was immediately around you, started to give off spooky vibes. It was now a ghost catching game.

Each cornstalk is made from 2 planes displaying a texture, which seemed like a better solution than having fully modelled corn over an entire field. To be perfectly honest, my PC probably couldn't handle that much anyway. Using the Blueprints nodes that I'd been learning to use up til then, I gave each cornstalk a swaying movement, to make the scene feel more "alive". My PC didn't seem to agree with it though, so I limited the movement to stalks in close proximity of the Player, which didn't change too much visually since you can't always see the entire field at once.

It's sometimes possible though and is actually a gameplay feature. To get a better idea of where they are in the cornfield, the Player can pull up a stepladder. They get a better view of their surroundings and can try and locate ghosts.

Once the Player locates a ghost, they'll have to catch it before it catches them, and what better weapon for the task than... a pressure cooker, what?! Oh but it's an enchanted pressure cooker. And it's multi-function. First function is Stun Mode: the Player aims the cooker at a ghost and if there's enough pressure, as indicated by the gauge on the lid that refills over time, they can release steam to stun the ghost for a short moment.

Whether they choose to stun or not, the Player still has to use the pressure cooker to catch the ghost, which brings us to its second function: it's a trap!

Upon throwing the pressure cooker to the ground, a vortex will open that catches any ghost wandering too close, effectively trapping and sealing it.

So the Player can catch ghosts, but there's a catch (pun intended): the pressure cooker can only hold one ghost at a time, and once a ghost is stored inside of it, it can't be used again until the ghost is purged and exorcised.

To exorcise a ghost, the Player has to release it outside of the cornfield, by throwing the pressure cooker while the ghost is trapped inside.

The ghost will then be released and will be able to move onto another plane of existence. Probably. Anyway it's not haunting the cornfield anymore at least.

Once the ghost has been exorcised, the pressure cooker can be picked up and used again to stun and catch more ghosts haunting the cornfield.

And that's the gist of what I've accomplished while working on this project. It is by no means a complete thing. It doesn't have any proper gameplay loop, merely the beginning of one. One of the things I was implementing when I had to set the project aside was Ghost Awareness: the ghosts were supposed to be able to see and hear the Player if they got too close or made too much noise. They would have been able to see the Player in front of them, depending on distance. They would have also been able to hear the Player if they were close enough and made too much noise. To avoid making noise, the Player is able to sneak around by moving slowly (that part was implemented). Upon detection, the ghost would have chased after the Player until they caught them or the Player escaped. To escape, the Player would have had 3 possibilities: put some distance between them and the ghost, get out of the cornfield or climb on top of the stepladder, which takes some time to pull out. The ghost would then resume their haunting, following their predetermined path.

I wish I could have done more with this one, but life hasn't allowed me enough time to keep learning UE5 and Blueprints so far.

These are fantastic tools and I wish I could afford to learn to use them properly, although I'd have to admit they're not perfect. Coming from Unity and C#, Blueprints are not too difficult to figure out and use. I've actually enjoyed that part. UE5 itself though is a tougher nut to crack imo. It offers so many possibilities but not all of them have felt intuitive, and I wish the tutorial series I'd been following was longer. I still want to learn to use them properly, but if I had to work on this project again, remaking it in Unity would probably be the best thing to do, for the sake of the project itself at least.

As a side note, at the time I enjoyed modelling a simple lowpoly ghost, but I also particularly enjoyed making the music myself, using Ableton and some nice plugins.