Simone Lazzarotto
Level Designer
Religious Silence
During the summer of 2024, three fellow designers and I, set out to create our first fully playable game together within a four-month timeframe, aiming to complete it before the start of our second academic year.
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Religious Silence is a horror, puzzle-driven, point-and-click game with strong narrative elements. Set in an orthodox monastery, the game follows the player’s journey into its depths, driven by the mysterious call of God.
My Contribution
As a small team, we each took on multiple roles throughout development.
My contributions included designing our core mechanic, the Transgression System.
Since we were working on a point-and-click game, the experience initially felt quite different from the 3D level design I was used to. However, I quickly realized that level design principles still played a fundamental role. Even without free 3D movement, we had to carefully plan the order of traversal, decide which rooms the player would access first, and control what elements were clearly visible in each scene, and what remained hidden.
Every room connection, camera angle, and object placement became a design decision that directly impacted pacing, exploration, and player engagement.
I was also responsible for designing the game’s various puzzles, ensuring they were engaging, intuitive, and easy to implement within the limits of our basic programming skills.
GDD
Religious Silence was developed using Godot, but the game scenes were assembled in Unreal Engine 5. I was responsible for creating the following scenes:
Postmortem
What Went Well:
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Managed Scope Effectively: We kept the project small and focused, avoiding overscoping. Our priority was to deliver a complete experience, even if not perfect, rather than an impressive but unfinished section.
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Strong Team Collaboration: Communication within the team was excellent. We followed the Agile methodology with weekly sprints, which kept us organized and on track throughout development.
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Visual Presentation: While none of us are professional environment artists, we were proud of how visually appealing the final result turned out.
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Playtesting with Broader Audiences: We learned how important it is to test the game with players who fall outside our target audience. These testers often play in unpredictable ways, which helped us uncover a major game-breaking bug that we were then able to fix.
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What Could Be Improved:
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Technical Limitations: Our limited programming experience made it difficult to polish certain gameplay aspects. One key issue was the absence of a save system, which led to player frustration when forced to restart from the beginning after failure.
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Puzzle Design Difficulty: Designing puzzles that are challenging but not frustrating proved more difficult than expected. Playtesting results were inconsistent, and we learned that at a certain point, you have to commit to a version you believe in. That said, the first puzzle should have been simpler to ease players into the game, and it wasn’t. This was my responsibility, and it’s something I’ve taken as a valuable lesson for future projects.​​