I'm cross-posting this to my cohost blog because I want to put all my longform text there too.

Intro

It's been another relatively successful MoLoGa jam! This year there were six submissions. Give them a try.

This year I went through a couple ideas before settling on the project I made. This year's theme was "Not Enough Space." My first thought was to create some kind of grappling/wrestling game where the arena would shrink over time. A ringout would be a win. But I couldn't for the life of me come up with an idea for how the game would actually be controlled.

My second idea was a  fast paced item collection game. The player would be on a smallish island with a simple maze-like layout. Enemies or something would stream in from the sea and clog up the playable space until the map was navigable. Players would score based off of how much they collected. Then I realized that's literally just Salmon Run and went to rethink things.

My final idea wasn't actually that different. Instead of being an island maze, what if the setting was an old house and the monsters were some vague, creepy, eldritch mass of eyes and teeth. And that's what I made.

What Went Wrong

Only one thing went really off the rails with this project. That was the animation. I originally wanted to use a single character "model" using Unity Sprite Animation to allow the character to rotate smoothly 360 degrees. This way the player could slowly sweep the flashlight across the rooms of the house which I felt would enhance the overall atmosphere.

The problem, however, is this kind of rigging is actually really frigging hard to pull off. Attempting to simulate rotation with a single image and rig resulted in horrible distortion and didn't work. The next thing I tried was to have three images, one facing forward, one sideways and one backward. The images still used the same rig and the movement worked somewhat better. Transitions from facing backward to facing right actually were really smooth.

Rotations from facing right to facing down, however, resulted in the character's limbs twisting through themselves grotesquely among other issues. While I probably could have fixed this the entire process of just rigging the main character had taken up about a week and a half of mostly redos and I needed to move on. In the end I went with a much simpler process of just having one sprite for each direction the player can face. Once this was done I only have about four days until the project was due and a big pile of stuff left to do. Because of loss of time I wasn't able to finish what I wanted to.

What Went Right

I really like the 2D lighting effects that come out of the box with Unity's URP. It's possible to get some nice shadows and volumetric effects with very little effort. With more effort I bet the lighting could be crazy good.

I'm pretty happy with the atmosphere created by the soundscape. I feel it gives the game a decent sense of place.

I didn't have enough time to code a proper "win" condition for the game. So instead I decided to go for a classic horror staple of having the story end very badly for the main character. Unlike a proper end I could do this easily by triggering enemy spawners to block all paths through the game and adding some dialog to indicate the incident is part of the story. From a programming perspective it's a complete hackjob but it at least gives the game a sort of climax and closure albeit not an amazing one.

Stuff that I wanted to do but ran out of time

• Breaking the window when the first batch of enemies appear
• Animations for the player getting hurt
• Have the player actually appear to be pulled into the mass of enemies when grabbed
• Character portraits
• Additional sounds for player actions
• Door animations

Final Thoughts

While the game is far from perfect I feel that I've at least made a decent proof of concept for a game that extends on the classic RPG Maker horror games. I had a good deal of fun making it and would gladly make a larger creepy game project later.