How I Made This Game (insert better title)

Making this game was a journey I’ll never forget. Engrained in my brain (that rhymes!) is AI code and zombie textures, the mark of making a (hopefully) great game.

I’ve joined the past 2 GoedWare jams but I’ve never submitted anything. Between releasing new horror games and school I haven’t had too much time to create something within a time limit. This time, however, I decided to go for it. $125 (in Amazon giftcard) grand prize seemed pretty sweet, and surely I could come up with something decent in a week…right? I eagerly awaited the theme reveal, doing some work on another game jam in the meantime (despite being way busier than during the last time I thought about entering GoedWare, I entered a bunch of other jams in hopes of raising money for my first big project). When the time came I opened the page and scrolled down. The theme was…alternate reality? Huh. Well that wasn’t a simple as I was hoping for. I sat back in my chair, mind racing with ideas. There were a lot of cool things you could do with that, but it’d be hard to implement a lot of them in the timeframe. Uncharacteristically, I decided to keep it in the back of my head and work on other stuff until I thought of something (normally I’d start designing things right away). Two days later I still had nothing and the deadline was fast approaching. I sat down and looked through my Unity assets, maybe some model packs would give me some inspiration. While looking through, in a moment that surely must’ve been divine intervention, I connected two assets: a post-apocalyptic city, and a survival shooter base. The gears in my head rapidly started turning. The model pack had signs that looked similar to The Division, talking about a virus and quarantine…now where had I heard that before? Aha! What if I made a game about an alternate reality/history where Covid had caused society to collapse. Or in other words, The Division on a much smaller scale. I immediately started working out a story. What if it was a deep and meaningful shooter with horror elements? After several iterations I had a basic storyline and script down. Scrapping the “vaccine turns people into zombies” and “go into a city with a bunch of zombies” ideas, I came up with a story where your daughter is sick and you must go into the gang-infested city to retrieve medicine for her. I could add a creepy zombie encounter as a side effect to Covid for a glimpse into more of this alternate reality. With everything planned out, I could now start. Boy did I not know what I was getting into!

I imported my assets quickly and took a deep breath. Where to start. It was very overwhelming but I knew I needed to break it into parts. First off, getting a player controller set up. I was using an old, deprecated shooter/survival tool but hopefully it would still work. Thankfully there were no errors and I was able to set up a really cool character controller relatively quickly. I couldn’t figure out how to set inventory items to be in your inventory on start so I just placed them on the ground. This actually worked out since it taught you how to pick things up. After that I started working on the path the player would take to the building where the medicine is. Along the way you would fight a gang. Super simple, I thought. Once I finished polishing the environment and creating a fun world to walk through (which required a lot of extra scenery to keep the illusion of a city), I set my sights on the enemies. I put down a prefab enemy with the intention of modifying him to fit the game. Before that I did a quick test to make sure it worked. It didn’t. For some reason the enemy would jitter around 5 inches above the ground and when you approached him, he would aim his gun in one direction and freeze. This is not typically how you want your AI to behave. I double checked all the parameters and made sure there was no AI manager or spawn points needed. I referred to the documentation but that only had how to setup new weapons, items etc. As a designer with very little coding skills (certainly not enough to build FPS ai from scratch), I had to find a way to make it work on my own. After two days of experimentation and no lack of confusion I solved the problem! Apparently the AI was trying to get a list of all the cover on the map and since I didn’t have any (and I didn’t have a list) it was being all broken. Simple solution was to, wait for it, aDD sOmE cOvEr TaGs. Once I added the cover the AI worked smoothly and I was able to begin customizing it. I messed with all sorts of stats and tried many different designs for the encounter before I found one that seemed challenging, but fun. Initially there was going to be a cutscene where you meet the gangsters but I had to cut that in the interest of time. After more polishing of the world (like adding cover so they player didn’t get pumped full of lead as soon as he came in the line of sight of the enemies) and tweaking the difficulty I finally finished the first level. I then began to plan the next part: where you go into a creepy office building and encounter a zombie. I couldn’t think of how I wanted it to look at first but after sleeping on it I was presented with a solution (again, I feel like it was divine intervention, and if you knew how confused I was you would too). I had an office pack and some office level designs from earlier games. I was able to plug that in quickly and add some spookiness. I wanted there to be an interaction with the zombie but I wasn’t sure how I could do that. Looking back I probably could’ve done some more clever tricks and effects to make it more interesting but I suppose hindsight is 20/20 (ironic for a game about 2020).

After testing both levels and making sure I was happy with each I looked to the final task: making the intro cutscene (well, that and the menu but that was easy). As you may have gathered from the earlier cutting of features I really don’t like making cutscenes. I think my first published game ruined me (it was almost all interactive cutscenes). I decided to go with a simple and artistic look. The camera would sweep across the ground of a forest outside a trailer where our main character set up the story by talking to his daughter. I had put out a request for voice actors and two very nice people were able to provide lines. Caleb Harris did Paul and Abbie Daigle did Maddy (the daughter). Props to them for doing what I’m sure were very awkward lines by themselves. You may also notice that the gangsters will talk during combat, they were voiced by my friend and fellow developer Daniel Thornton. Unfortunately those voice lines aren’t super loud so it can be hard to hear them (oops) but let’s just say it adds to the immersion and realistic chaos of the firefight. After editing together the beginning audio and finishing up the menus I was in the home stretch. I made 3 builds (first one was just fixing random bugs and glitches after a playtest), I was briefly afraid I had messed something up when the build wasn’t playing the cutscene first before I realized I’d forgotten to set the menu to go to the cutscene before the main level (derp). After packaging it up I edited together what is probably the worst trailer I’ve ever made and went through the tedious process of making the screenshots smaller so I could upload them to itch (5mb size limit?!). I would say I was never so relieved to publish a game but Pizza Ghost: The Videogame was way more frustrating to make (unrelated that game is available on my itch profile for FREE). Despite the time and confusion it took I am very proud of this game. Coming in late to the jam and making a nicely atmospheric game is a very nice feeling. I hope you all enjoy the game and huge kudos if you read this rambling thing, this is the most I’ve ever wrote for something like this. I’ll see you all next time! God be with you :)

- Luke Smith (the entirety of Magic Chicken Studios)