GD2 Blog: Week 10

Game Jam

As of the 6th of December, we started a game jam that’d last for a week. Grouping with 5 other people, we managed to work on a game under the theme of implementing 10 seconds into our game.

We spent our first couple of hours planning what our game was going to be, and we settled on the idea of 10 second escape rooms, however instead of having to complete one room in 10 seconds, there was a monster getting closer to the player every 10 seconds.

We thought of different possible styles for the game and its mechanics, and settled on doing a horror themed game with fixed camera angles coupled with a retro looking style (See Figure 1).

Upon further planning, we decided on what mechanics we’d want for an escape room style game – most of which ended up being simple puzzle ones such as pressure plates, moving crates and switches.

With these in mind, I sketched out the first 6 levels introducing each mechanic one by one until mixing them together by the last couple of rooms – this will be done without any tutorial and will instead be done with a more simpler style of level design (See Figure 2).

We’ll be doing this as to keep our game as simple as possible for the gamejam, due to its fast paced nature we will need to teach the player as fast as possible rather than to hold them back by explaining with tutorials.

Once started on the game, I worked on the level design and mechanics – the player mechanics and controls were handled by a different member of the team.

Figure 3 shows the final product of the game, which features a fully working UI system that shows the player their current room location as well as the monster’s, included is also a flashlight which shows its current charge.

I’ll be going into how I created the structure of the first 6 puzzles in the game. The following puzzle in this starter room is to stack the crate on the pressure plate, which is wired to a locked door.

Following the stacking mechanic introduced earlier, the player is given a puzzle where they must form a bridge by stacking crates next to eachother to get to the other side of a gap.

The next puzzle introduces a new mechanic, which is a switch. The player simply walks up to this to open up a locked door similar to the pressure plate but it doesn’t require a crate.

The next puzzle combines the mechanics of the last couple of puzzles, where the player needs to stack a crate to get across a gap into a room with a switch, this then unlocks the door the player can carry the previous crate through to place on a pressure plate.

The next puzzle is similar to the last one, but is in a dark area the player has to navigate, this is where the flashlight mechanic comes in to help the player see in the dark.

The next puzzle level introduces elevators, this level starts off with a crate already on a pressure plate which immediately calls down an elevator to the player’s view. The player uses this to take the crate off the pressure plate which then reverses the elevator to go up and onto the platform.

Detailing further about how the 10 second mechanic works, every room you succeed in passing rewards the player an extra 10 seconds that carries over. This means the player will be rewarded with more time the faster they solve a level.

However after each 10 seconds that pass, the monster will also go forwards by 1 room – this is depicted in-game by a screenshake and UI warning that the monster is approaching closer. If the monster is behind the player by one room, then they will start to appear in the current room the player is in before catching up and sending them to a gameover state.

This should emit a feeling of pressure and panic into the player, which I feel conveys the horror part of the game quite well, as it seems that the monster is actively hunting the player.

For our game, I feel as if we managed to achieve our goal for what we set out to do and made a fun puzzle game in the end whilst utilizing the game jam’s 10 second theme. I am quite proud of how everything turned out in the end, especially as this was one of the first games I worked on within a group.

Bibliography

Lowenthal, M., 2020. How Video Games Introduce Their Mechanics. [online] Pausebutton.substack.com. Available at: https://pausebutton.substack.com/p/how-video-games-introduce-their-mechanics [Accessed 13 December 2021].