Postmortem: You Are Not Alone

[DISCLAIMER] This project was going to a part of Brackys Game Jam 2022.2 but due to my inability to research what “UTC” meant when reading the cut-off time, it was too late for me to upload. Something to remember to do next time, I guess.

After coming out the other side of Brackys Game Jam 2022.2, I’ve come to realise that one week is not a lot of time to develop a game. To put it into perspective, that’s seven days, or one-hundred and sixty-eight hours. When I factored in sleep (an average of around seven hours in Australia), work (eight-teen hours of work for me that week) and other commitments (another eleven hours) that came down to forty-one hours of game development time. Even when I didn’t factor in things like eating and travel time, that was still less than two days to work on a game. though it may have seemed like not enough time to make a game, I was surprised to find that, when given a deadline, I was able to stay focused on the project for longer than I normally might.

I did not have any ambitious goals when I started this game jam. When I first heard that the theme was going to be, “You’re Not Alone” I quickly had this vision of a brightly lit hallway or corner that projected a ghastly shadow of a person/monster. I quickly mocked something up in Unity that consisted of a light source and a sphere to get a better understanding of Unity’s real-time lighting system. I then decided that a corridor was needed to show off what was, essentially, a set piece. From there, I drew up a simple layout for the level, drawing rooms and door placements.

A level needs boundaries to contain the player and since my game was going to be set in an abandoned/haunted home, I needed walls. I came up with a design in Blender that would be a modular approach to keep a consistent scale throughout the project. What I quickly realised, after only having made one wall, was that I needed to plan for both intersecting walls and corners. After a bit more design work, I had enough assets to begin building the foundations of my game world.

[INSERT SCREENSHOTS OF GAME WORLD]

The level itself was setup using assets that I had created, but to save time, I decided it would be easier to use a couple of free asset packs from the Unity Asset Store to fill up the empty spaces. Every piece of furniture or appliance was sourced from either Vertex Studio’s, “Big Furniture Pack” or Alstra Infinite’s “Kitchen Appliance – Low Poly”.

Audio was another aspect of the game that I sourced from free assets. I had plans to record my own audio but decided against it when I factored in my skill level (virtually non-existent) and the amount of time I had left for the jam (maybe around two days at that point). The sounds I used were sourced from John Leonard French’s, “Western Audio & Music” and was what really brought the game to life. Despite the contrast in genres, there were sounds for doors and footsteps, which were used quite a bit throughout the project. The main score came from a pack by Black Leaf Studios called, “Horror Atmosphere LITE”. I had some difficulties transitioning between tracks, which was fixed by fading out the track that was about to finish, to then fade in the track that was about to play next.

Despite not being able to have my game a part of the voting process of Brackys Game Jam 2022.2, I happy to have finished this game within a reasonable time frame.  Let me know what aspects of the game you liked or did not like. The more feedback the better.

Have fun.

 - James