Summary: A young girl explores a haunted mansion to find a legendary piece of candy.
Engine: Unity
Programming Language: C#
Length of Development: 2 Months
Number of Team Members: 4
My Team Roles: Team Lead, Level Designer, UI Programmer
Introduction:
In October of 2022, I participated in the Spooky 2D Jam, which took place just a week before Halloween. Prior to this, I assembled a team to participate in this game jam with. This includes LoFi Boy as Artist, oHoodie as Lead Programmer, jDawg as sound designer and composer, and myself as the roles listed above. We took some time before the jam to know one another, and we got along really well. We got together right as the jam started to begin work on what was truly special to all of us.
Day One:
As soon as the theme was announced, we immediately began brainstorming ideas for the game. After about an hour, we collectively decided to make a game about a girl who goes into a haunted mansion to get a piece of candy. Once that was clear, we made a list of tasks that we would do during the jam on a google doc, and then went on to do our parts. For this day, I first created the Unity project for the game and created a repo on GitHub so that oHoodie can get started with programming for the player character. I then did the level design, as this would be one of the core pillars of our game. I based the mansion on a layout of a one story home that I found online, and then threw in some original elements to match with the theming. I also added locations for the various items and enemies that the player would encounter.
Once that was done, I realized I had to redo the Unity project. This is because oHoodie contacted me about some issues related to getting the shadows to work properly. After some testing, we realized that for the shadows to work as we wanted, we would need to make a new unity project with Universal Rendering Pipeline enabled, as that would have crucial features that the standalone package did not. Thankfully, this happened early enough to where we could redo the project without losing too much progress, and once we did the shadows were working as intended. With the level design done and the project properly setup, the UI would be next.
Day Two:
On the second day, I began to focus a lot more on the UI. First, I worked on the main menu and its sub screens, which included the instructions and the credits. I put some placeholder text until we had the game more fleshed out, and ensured that it would go to the game scene if the player clicked the play button. I also made the win and lose scenes, which linked to both the game and menu scenes. After that, I worked with oHoodie on the level UI for the player, and ensured that it was anchored properly and was dynamically updating based on player health. By this point, LoFi had a good chuck of the art done, so I was able to put it into the game for both the main level and the UI screens, while oHoodie focused on implementing the art and making animations for the various characters and items for the game. I was also able to add some of the music for the game, as Jdawg a a couple of tracks composed. With this work done, there was just a few left to do.
Day Three:
By this point, all the pieces that were needed for the game by the various team members had been complete. The only left to do was to put it all together in the game scene, where the bulk of the game would be. It would fall on me to bring it all together, as oHoodie was unable to help due to a prior commitment that he needed to address. Thankfully, since most of the work was done, it was just a matter of putting the items and enemies based on the level design layout that I planned on Friday. While I was doing that, LoFi was working on the content for our itch page. Once I did that, I playtested the game several times, and adjusted the parameters for the various game elements to ensure an optimal game experience. Once it was just right, I made a build for the game, and by this point the itch page was nearly complete. Once the build was added to the itch page, and after a few more playtests, it was ready to be submitted for the jam. I then made the submission with just a few minutes, and the initial phase of development was complete.
Playtest Feedback:
Overall, the feedback that we got was truly phenomenal. Many people praised many aspects of the game, from the art and animations to the music and sound design and even the layout of the mansion that players got to explore. In fact, the game did so well that when the rating period was concluded, it managed to get 7th place out of 60 entries. The fact that it did so well was so exhilarating for both myself and the team, and it made all the work that we did pay off in a fantastic way. But this would not be the end of Shoot and Seek's development.
Subsequent Updates:
Once the rating period for the jam was over, we immediately began working on a patch to resolve some of the things that we didn't get to do during the jam. This includes making the music loop, preventing the skeletons from spawning inside of walls, and ensuring that the UI scales properly based on screen size. After that, we started to work on the final boss, but that took a bit longer than we expected, mainly because of the additional mechanics and animations needed for it to stand out from basic enemies in a meaningful way. But on December 19th, we uploaded the latest build of the game with the final boss ready to wreak havoc on the player.
Post Mortem:
Overall, I had such a blast working on this game. Even before the jam started, the team and I got along so well and were excited to make this game, regardless of what the theme was. During the jam, we gave it our all to make this game that best that it could possibly be, and it really put my design, programming, and leadership skills to the test. Due to its positive reception, it gave us the motivation to want to keep working on it until it was fully in line with our original version, and turned out even better than we could possibly imagine. To this day, it remains one of the best games that I've ever made, and remains one of my personal favriotes.
Game Designer & Developer