02/02/2021 – Global Game Jam 2021

Let’s get this out of the way, the game did not get finished within the 48 hours.

My friend was very proud of this. The station name apparently says “Placeholder”.

We were trying to build a game similar to Slenderman with a shade of STALKER. The player goes around picking up parts, after they pick up the first part, a monster spawns in and starts following the player around. Where it differs to Slenderman is that the monster is supposed to react to sound to find where the player is, and actually attack the player more directly rather than just going insane.

So how did it go? Not terribly from a gameplay point of view. You can start and finish the game, which I consider to be somewhat of a success.

Our problems mostly stemmed from issues transferring models from Blender to Unity. Several of the models had buggered UVs and culling problems. Because of that I had to wait quite a while to even have enough art stuff done to actually get the game up and running to its current state.

The second major issue was the monster itself, importing it into Unity often led to it not having the animations, or when it did have the animations, they would get deleted after converting the model from a generic to a humanoid rig. Once it was converted to a humanoid rig, the bones themselves would cause errors. At this point it was very late into the second day and the decision as to whether or not we should stay up came into question. Based on the amount of work that was still required, we decided to call it a night there.

However, the story doesn’t end there.

Today, I started added additional models into the level, fixing up the collisions, and added more spawn points for the items. I also looked into the monster rigging again and found the bone structure problem and fixed it, but after getting deeper into configuring the model I found that the skeleton was backwards in places. After talking to my friend who helped with that aspect of the game, we both came to the conclusion that it should probably be re-done.

So that’s where the game is at. I’m gonna put a link to the Itch.io and GGJ pages here, and you can check in on them if you want keep up with development.

-Adam