Dead by Daylight

28 Oct 2024 - 1 Nov 2024

Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning

This Dead by Daylight board game was a week long challenge for the Sheridan Game Design program's Design Week.

Our team given steam keys from Behaviour Interactive to re-imagine Dead by Daylight as a board game.

The game is played by 5 players: 4 survivors and 1 killer.

The survivors are trying to avoid the killer while fixing the generators spread across the map.
The killer is trying to catch the players by hooking them, which involves starting a chase, revealing the killer's location and any nearby survivors. The chase continues, with both parties revealing their locations until either the survivor gets to a far enough distance from the killer, or the killer lands on the same square as the survivor, hooking them.

Completed Game

The game has two identical boards, each blocked off to the opposing team.

The board is populated with player tokens and different kinds of tiles, such as generators, palette, and event.

Each survivor is given a 6 sided die, while the killer is given a 4 sided die.

Paper Prototype

This early prototype was built using paper, dice, and modular Role-playing Game grids.

The players were designated as small paper stars, the killer being the red star.

This allowed us to easily test and modify the game and level design as needed.

Testing the Paper Prototype

To test the paper prototype, we would use more of the modular grids to block our view from one another.

Research on Dead by Daylight's Core Gameplay Elements

At the start of the project, we played multiple rounds of Dead by Daylight as a group to better understand what are the core pillars of the game and what we would need to bring to the board game to keep it faithful to the orig

Concept Proposal

My original proposal involved the two large grids for the players to move their characters across.

This included the elements obtained from our research, and modified into a board game space.

Many of the proposed ideas were taken into the game or modified.

I had originally proposed implementing action points, however we decided it would be too hard to keep track of for the players.

I also proposed dice rolls to make sounds to reveal the player's location, which ended up merging with the movement.

Tiles

There are multiple kinds of tiles: sound, palettes, generators, and event.

I implemented sound tiles to give the players an easy method of remembering where the last location announced by the enemy team was.

The generators are placed on specific locations in the map, and all start unpowered. Once a player completes a successful roll when near a generator, they flip it to reveal the fixed side.

The palette tiles cost 1 movement action to drop, and fully block the killer while allowing the survivors to vault over them, which reveals their location.

Event tiles are placed on high rolls when traversing the map for both teams, each having unique effects on the players, such as giving the players a spot to avoid the killer's chase, or which reveals their location to the killer, which ends up varying gameplay.

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