HUSH HUSH HIGH
GODOT | GamePLAY AND LEVEL Designer
A quirky stealth game where you play as Mochi, a gossip monger who can't keep her mouth shut. Step into the mind of Mochi as she navigates through the corridors her high school and stop her from spreading the gossip.
Hush Hush High is not a typical stealth game, where you have to hide and distract the enemies, but more of a puzzle stealth.
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Set in a high school, you play as Mochi who loves to talk and can't keep any gossip to herself. She will try and spread it to any person she sees in front of her. The player has to "pull her back" every time she sees someone. Hence all the stealth mechanics are inverted. It's the player's job to distract Mochi and keep others away from her vision radius.
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WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO?
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As a High school student, help Mochi focus on her studies.
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Attend daily classes.
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Run some errands.
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Finish the day without spilling a word, especially to the person the gossip is about.
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Things can easily go out of hands if you share it even with a single person.
LEVEL DESIGN
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It was pretty interesting how it all started for level design in Hush Hush High.
During the Game Jam, we had only 1 day to build the world. This includes the main map, which needs to be a highschool with corridors, different rooms to show diversity, assets for all the rooms and the corridors, and NPC placement that defines the difficulty of the level.
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Result? A pretty simple rectangular floor with 11 rooms; 6 classrooms, 1 staff room, 1 admin room, 1 cafeteria and 1 big library in the center. We started off by creating a symmetric layout first to have a base to work on. And as we went on creating rooms, we moved some walls around to break the symmetry a bit. We couldn't unfortunately break it enough as the more rooms we had the more assets it would have required. While working in the 1 day time constraint, this is what we ended up with.
Unfortunately, we missed the submission by 1 min as we couldn't find the submit button. But we loved the concept and wanted to build it properly. So we scrapped the old layout and started out fresh.
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We started with some research and our primary inspirations were US High Schools. We looked at the architecture and layouts of various High School and Universities and started studying how each room is positioned.
We noticed an interesting pattern in reference floor plans. High schools have visitor area which is separated from the rest of the school by doors, and only the students and staff are allowed to enter through those doors to the main campus area. Other common traits that the high schools have are the long corridors branching to multiple classrooms.
Being a highschool, there are a lot of extra curricular activities that also happen. So we went deeper into finding room specific references from high school and came up with some common activity rooms that most of the high schools have. Some of these are Computer lab, music room, physics lab, Art room and Basketball court. And lastly, to make the world more functional, we added some general purpose rooms like storage, bathrooms, staff rooms, and cafeteria.
Taking the references in mind, we started sketching out the layout on paper. With multiple iterations, we came with this layout.
The sketch itself is a rough layout that gives us the base for the level. As we had already defined our character height and had the character controller already implemented, we took this rough sketch into Godot and placed it in the level. We placed NPCs on this sketch and playtested the layout. This gave us the idea on the level design as well as the dimensions of the hallways, rooms, stairs and all other walkable areas in the map.
Using the older tileset, we started placing the floors, walls and other random assets to blockout the floors. With this, we further adjusted the size of the rooms and walkable areas that felt good for our gameplay. Once we were happy with the overall dimensions and structure of both the floors, we went back to Aseprite and started creating assets.
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Our approach was to create the entire layout with all the furniture and set dressing in Asesprite itself rather than setting it up in Godot. The problem we were trying to tackle was we were using the grid size of 16x16 which limited us with the set dressing. Most of it felt unnatural as the assets that were placed were spaced out at equal distance.
For example, in the computer lab, even though the computers are placed in a line, with a 16x16 grid we were limited with the number computers we could place and it was taking away from the feeling of the computer lab being congested like our references. Similar issues were faced in multiple rooms including the Physics lab, Cafeteria, and Orchestra room. Being a smaller world, we were fine to compromise the larger tilemap size for a more aesthetic and natural looking high school layout.
This process did bring some tedious work like setting up colliders, walkable floors, Y-sorting, and required tons of playtesting to ensure everything was correctly setup in the entire map. Also small mistakes in the assets like a few missing pixels were really hard to spot. These issues could have been avoided if tiles were reused, hence reducing all this work significantly.​​
Final layout of the high school with sketch references
NPC placement for tuning
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A vital element of the level design was NPC placement and their pathing. This defines the difficulty of each level as the player needs to navigate through them without getting too close to any of the NPCs, there isn't any corner where players won't have a chance to avoid the NPC making it unfair for them.
We placed roughly 100 NPCs per level and defined routines for each of the 100 NPCs manually. All these placements were carefully done as per the difficulty we were aiming for each level. Additionally, we had to make changes to the routines for some of the NPCs as well, either remove them, or change their path on each level. This was primarily required as the timetable is different for each day and the player has to go to different classrooms which leads to different routes that the player takes on each day.
NPC Routines
NPCs have 3 types of routines, static, attending classes, and roaming in the corridors. Most of these are placed in a way where players can create stories in their head. In our playtest, we saw a lot of players just loved making up narrations about certain NPCs by looking at how they are placed in the world.
We also placed some easter eggs throughout the map to give some quirkiness to the high school setup and most of it came from real life experiences. To give one such example, we defined routines for a male and a female NPC that go to the storage room on the first floor at a certain delay, stay there for a while, and come out one after the other (If you know, you know 😛).
Level Blockers
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We have 5 levels in total in the game. After multiple playtests, we realised that the player gets familiar with the layout of the high school till they finish level 2. That’s obviously after multiple failed attempts. But the challenge of avoiding NPCs itself becomes repetitive and nothing changes in the game world to provide any new challenge.
To tackle this, we wanted a system that was easy to integrate with the existing game, and that can add an interesting twist to the game rather than just making it harder.
We thought of the classic level blockers. Basically, some sections of the maps can be blocked off, hence forcing the player to find new routes for their tasks. We planned to have these level blockers from level 3 as a difficulty modifier to the already existing NPC interactions. This also helped us in letting the players explore the world further by redirecting them through lesser accessed areas.
We made 2 types of level blockers; 1st is the regular blocker that simply blocks the passage and the 2nd one is the water spillage which allows all NPCs and the player to walk on top of it but reduces the movement speed while crossing it.
Mochi Vending Machines
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To give a brief on what a Mochi vending machine does, it basically has 2 functionalities.
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It gives Mochi, the main character, something to eat so she's distracted. Using this, players can cross long distances without worrying about spilling the gossip.
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If the gossip is already spreading, eating mochi can stop the spreading for a few seconds which if used strategically, gives the player enough time to finish the level.
There are a total of 4 Mochi vending machines placed in the entire map. The placement was carefully done for the vending machine so that players can cover the majority of crowded areas using it as they try to reach their objective. The distance between each machine is also enough that if the player eats from one, they get enough time to reach the other one. But this could have also led to spamming of Mochis, so we limited its usage to 5.
Tools Used
Godot
Aseprite
Figma
Github
Notion