The Making of The Grady Group

I originally came up with the idea while working on Mowing At Night. What if the beloved TV show “The Brady Bunch” was made into a horror game? A terrifying prospect to be sure. I put the project in my ideas list and forgot about it…that is until the TPS Fall Game jam. Since I was hosting it I chose the theme of “old” which I thought would be a good and open-ended. When reviewing my idea list for games I could do for the jam, I found The Brady Bunch idea. It perfectly fit with the theme so I decided to give it a go. I started thinking about how the game would work. After a couple of dead end designs, I had an epiphany with a point-and-click interface with camera angles from the show. Not only would it make for a spookier experience, but it’d also cut down on level design time since I just had to worry about what you could see on camera and not around it. I found a layout of the house (with props like tables and chairs) and got started making the level.

Making a level based on an existing layout is trickier than you’d think. Yes you don’t have to worry about coming up with something from scratch but you’re quite limited in terms of creative fun player interactions through level design. I started building my scene using the Synty Town Pack. It has tons of great art and props for the house. The only problem is that I couldn’t replicate the exact colors and materials used on the show. I figured since this was sort of a spoof show it wouldn’t be a huge deal, and the layout would have to be enough. The beginning part was easy enough, I did somehow mess up the alignment so some of the floors aren’t perfect but you can’t really notice it anyways. I spent way too long messing with the walls so it didn’t look too weird or clip into the wall next to them. Props were fun to place and I was able to place them really accurately. The dead adults unfortunately didn't turn out as well as I had wanted but they do the job. The level design took probably about 4ish hours to make. During that time I also set up the player and cameras as well as a simple object interaction system.

The gameplay for this game was a ton of fun to make. It was simple to do and (in my opinion), works really well. For the object interaction system I used a simple little script that would display dialogue when the mouse clicked on the object’s world position (using colliders). For the cameras I actually had it teleport you to a marker instead of just switching cameras so that you could easily walk between rooms without your character getting stuck behind a door. For the objects you can pickup I used a global bool (bool, or boolean, is a true or false variable) system. There's probably a better way to do it but I'm a designer, not a programmer. For most of my horror games I use the Horror FPS Kit but since this would require too much modifying I decided to use Game Creator 1. I typically use GC1 for doing simple tasks that I don't want to learn how to program in C# and have only used it exclusively in 2 games. Anyways, I made it so each object had a bool, and when you clicked on it, it would give a short dialogue and then switch the bool from false to true. Since the game would require crafting I created a dialogue inventory. When you press "C" it opens a dialogue that you can navigate through to craft and inspect items for hints. I hate doing UI so that's why it's not a visual system. It checks to see which item's bools are true and displays only those. It's actually simpler than it seems. For example **SPOILER** when creating the key mold by combining the clay and metalworking book the clay object doesn't actually change. It simply disables the clay and enables the clay mold. **END SPOILER** Putting this together was pretty easy it just took a very long time writing everything up and making sure the dialogue didn't dead-end anywhere. I think it turned out ok though.