The theme was 'set it free', so we had a good think and settled on an atmospheric horror game set in a maze, that requires you to lead different coloured butterflies to open gates and get out.
This is what we ended up with at the end of the weekend. I feel like we created a good first level of a game here, the atmosphere is pretty good, the maze isn't too complex and the concepts about how butterflies interact with the gates, pools and other butterflies is put across to the player in an easy to understand way, with any hand holding.
We liked the feel and concept so much it'll be getting worked on for the next few months to see if we can make it into something better.
So our list of stuff to do is:
All new models, textures and materials
The ones we are using are decent and open source, but they don't come together as a cohesive art style.
New music and sounds
Pretty self explanatory. The music was knocked out in LMMS in a morning and the quality certainly reflects the time that was put in. And the sound effects were made in the most ghetto possible way, the foot steps where a ball of socks pushed into a tupperware container of gravel.
Failure state
Obviously a game without a failure state is a game for filthy casual scumbags. All joking aside, a failure state in a horror game is a tough thing to get right. The monsters in Amnesia here scary right up until you charged at them and saw that the textures were of a middling resolution and the animations were a little janky. (I love both those games, before you start).
Two games that get the potential horror of a failure state right is The Last Of Us and Resident Evil 4. Seeing Leon have his head cut off with a chainsaw and watching his twitching body drop to floor stuck with me for a while and had me running from those chainsaw enemies in terror. And as for The Last Of Us, well...
So that's going to be the largest challenge early in development.
The aim I think will be to make 3 or 4 different environments in order to keep the player interested in exploring the world. Making a short game of only 2 or 3 hours also keeps the player interested. It means you can introduce mechanics and environments at a decent rate without having to stretch out your content. Something that a certain triple A Alien game was guilty of.
There will obviously be updates every month or so with the hope of having a game released by the end of the year.
You can download the game we had by the end of weekend here. It's quite short, and may not be super performant on lower end machines.
Game Jam Submission Link
Matt
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