The Wrong Kind of Shadow
First Place
A short horror adventure game created for Senscape’s Adventurous Game Jam, which won first place. I had to ensure I didn't take on too much for the two week limitation, but I also really wanted to test my skills and create a working game that satisfied the theme and requirements. The overall theme was adventure and a sub theme was “When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.” - Ursula K. LeGuin
My Contribution
The main focus on this project was to try and organize and plan for a project to be done within a tight time-frame. I also wanted to use the skills that I’ve learned up to this point with what I’m currently learning from working on If the War Comes. You can read more about it and try it out here: https://snougi.itch.io/the-wrong-kind-of-shadow
What I Learned
This was the first game jam I’ve joined in a few years. So coming back to it I realized how stressful it potentially can be, especially if you aim a little bit too big!
- Planning a proof of concept: When planning out the game I really wanted to use limited amounts of mechanics and emphasise narrative driven solutions to the puzzles, This let me focus more on the story rather than trying to come up with new mechanics. The mentality from the beginning was always to create a proof of concept: if something was rough, but worked, it stayed and I moved on to the next part of the project and I improved some elements at the end of the two weeks with the time I had remaining.
- Using free assets to save time: In order to save time as well as push the overall games theme I had to learn to find and use free assets. The end product ended up looking really good on top of saving me a whole bunch of time! I still had to create some custom assets that would push the narrative forward. I wanted to make sure that the assets I used felt like they belonged.
- Writing the details of the story on the fly: Going into this project I had a vague idea of what kind of story I wanted to tell. So while working on the mechanics of the puzzles I also wrote details of the story as I went. This allowed me to write story-solutions to puzzles that would fit the puzzles design and difficulty. The story eventually was very heavily pushed through solving the puzzles.
