Future Game — Uncanny Resemblance

Veronica Yung
4 min readDec 29, 2020

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Game Summary

Uncanny Resemblance begins in an unusual maze. You and four other players discover keys imprinted on your arm and are given a task to collect five keys hidden inside the walls of the maze. As you begin to find keys in the maze, you come across the spitting image of people who look identical to your teammates. The only difference would be, while you and your teammates are finding keys inside the walls of the maze, these look-alikes are looking for the ones embedded inside your arm. This is a fearful race of finding keys, do not be fooled by your humanoid self, and be sure to never stay in the same place for too long.

Keys

Each player will have access to a map with key locations, 1–2 players are required to unlock and retrieve a key. To unlock a key, there will be trivial tasks that you must complete. These tasks may range from typing your userID into the system, or simply having two people hold down a lever at the same time.

Keys embedded inside your arm have trackers on them, humanoids released into the maze can detect your location. For them to collect the keys, they must tear apart your body and rip it out.

Humanoids

Upon collecting a key and seeing it appear in a player’s inventory, a humanoid is released into the center of the maze. For every player, there will be a corresponding humanoid, they will be released in random order.

humanoid-player sketch

Difference between Players and Humanoids

  • they cannot speak to you, but you may hear them make deep breathing sounds
  • immortal
  • night vision
  • cannot enter tunnels

Humanoids may only rip out one key at a time, it takes them 10 seconds to retrieve a key. While a humanoid is fixed on a player, you may sneak past them and escape.

Players

Humans start in the middle of the maze and are given torches, however, torches are unreliable and must be relit every 5-minutes. You may find flashlights hidden inside the maze, however, there are only four.

Players have access to a voice chat and all players can communicate with one another throughout the whole map. Beware, the voice chat is disabled for 30-seconds every time a humanoid collects a key.

When players die, they will reappear in the maze as invisible ghosts and may maneuver objects around the maze to slow down humanoids or to scare fellow players.

Tunnels

There won’t be many of these, however, once you stumble upon one, you may use it to relocate yourself around the map. The relocation is random and once a tunnel is used, it will disappear.

Items

Weapons: these items may be used to stun the humanoids

Potions: grants you special powers that may make you invisible to humanoids, have night vision, or super speed. The duration of the potion’s effect will range from 10 to 30 seconds.

Equipable:

  • shield: grants you an extra life if you are caught by a humanoid. You will immediately be relocated somewhere randomly on the map.
  • green card: you will have a floating green indicator above your character, and other players can easily detect that you are not a humanoid.
  • GPS blocker: you will not appear on all humanoid radars for 20-seconds.

The Maze

Instead of having a collection of maze maps, each time the game is initialized, a new maze is generated. As players walk through the maze, there will be random objects that act as obstacles that cannot be broken or looted.

Inspiration

This game was inspired by the horror movie Us and the game Dead by Daylight. Personally, the movie didn’t seem scary when I watched it in theatres, however, as I went home and dreamt that I was in the movie and saw a mirror image of myself, I was truly afraid. As well, in Dead by Daylight, I liked the concept of “cat and mouse,” it brought back the nostalgic feeling you get when you played hide and seek as a kid, and so I wanted to integrate this aspect into a game. Combining both ideas together became something frighteningly entertaining, and so it became Uncanny Resemblance.

That’s a Wrap

As another stinky disclaimer, I am a first-year computer science student who has yet to take her first game development course. Any feedback on whether these games are a nay or yay would be wonderful, if not, I hope you enjoyed reading. More ideas are to come so keep posted!

Find me on:

Github: https://github.com/veronicaYung

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronica-yung/

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Veronica Yung
Veronica Yung

Written by Veronica Yung

Welcome! I am a game dev student who plays absolutely no games, however, I like to wake up at 6 AM to jot down ideas… and so that’s exactly what I write about.