Trick or Treat?
Rated #94 overall out of 307 entries in Scream Jam 2023.
The TL;DR
This is the first game jam I participated in
7 day game jam
Team of myself and two other members of the game design program
Submitted a polished playable build by the deadline
The Requirements
7 days of development time
The theme is general “horror”
We want the game to be playable in browser to encourage people to play it
The Jam
We started by determining basic context for the game and what we all wanted to do
None of us had participated in a game jam before
We wanted to do something 3D, since all of us only had experience working in 2D
We planned a system based on answering the door and identifying if the person outside was safe or not
One member of the team left the jam in the wireframing stage due to unforeseen circumstances
We were able to implement the core system in unity and focus on making scares using free 3D assets
We put in a couple of very late nights and submitted a completed game before the deadline
What I learned
Appealing thumbnails and screenshots of the game on the itch.io page are important to get people to play the game
Scoping needs to be done more conservatively than it was in this game to account for unexpected obstacles
Getting a build of the game working in a browser is another layer of complication, so getting it working in browser early is important for testing
Finding and implementing appealing assets for a game is difficult without a budget or having an artist on the team
Longer explanation
Trick or Treat is a game created for Scream Jam in 2023. This was my first game jam so I was unsure of what to expect but I was ultimately very happy with how everything turned out. Since the jam was fairly open ended with a general “horror” theme and was set around Halloween, we discussed different options and settled on making a 3D game in unity with a “trick or treat” theme. None of us had made a 3D project before, but we all had unity experience. We took the idea of trick or treating and added higher stakes, with the player choosing whether or not to let people that appeared outside of their door into their bunker.
We scoped out a fairly simple setup for the mechanics and made the beginnings of the game when one of our team members needed to drop out. That meant needing overtime to finish work that had been scoped for 3 people with 2 people instead.
I used what I had learned when putting Flicker together and we were able to create a simple analog horror aesthetic using 3D shapes and free 3D models. I aimed to emulate the feeling of using computers from the late 1980s, and used Universal Render Pipeline like I had in Flicker in order to create the lighting effects that were key to both making effective scares and making the player’s UI look believably like it was a part of the game world.
We decided to use a camera filter based on security cameras that was applied to only the screen by using a separate camera and render texture. The postprocessing effects that we used were chosen both because they fit well on theme, and because they obscured areas where there were issues with the 3D models that we didn’t have the time to fix. When these effects were coupled with lighting changes, the gameplay became more challenging as the player had to look more carefully for something being “off”.
We finished the game and submitted it with a variety of scares and a simple scoring system based on how many of the encounters the player had correctly identified. Once the judging period was complete, we were assigned the rank of #94 overall. The game performed much better than I expected for a first attempt, and I learned a lot of valuable things to implement in future game jams.
