Game Jam Dev Diary
25/07/2024
It's been a *while* since I've worked on some solo dev stuff (just over a year now since the last dev diary!) So I thought it would be fun to do a little one based on a game jam I've been doing lately!
Over the past week or so, I've been creating a game for the Retro Horror Jam, a game jam that utilizes the Retro Horror Template for Unity (which is what I was using to create SOTBS!) It's been super fun finally getting back into the swing of things (´｡• ω •｡`)
Main Premise:
Aviary is a game about a girl trapped in a cage. Locked up for years by a mysterious captor, she decides that today is the day that she'll finally attempt to escape. The game is a third person, tank controlled game in which you have to explore your environment to find key items that'll aid your escape.
(The idea for this game actually came from me not being able to sleep one night, and lay there for hours listening to birds at my windowsill. Go figure?)
Gameplay:
As mentioned previously, Aviary is a tank controlled game inspired by the obvious horror classics. The game takes place solely in your character's 'home' - a bird cage hanging up in your captor's bedroom. To progress and eventually escape, the main character needs to collect multiple items around her space to solve simple puzzles that will help her reach her goal.
While you play, your captor will come in and out at times to 'check up' on her property. Programming her pathing was pretty simple, and required use of a NavMeshAgent.
One mechanic that I wanted to put in was to have the captor harm the player if they were not hiding by the time that she came over to check on you. Elements of this can be found in-game with the fact that you can hide in a specific spot until you decide to come back out. Unfortunately this was stripped because of time constraints, but it would've been a cool feature.
Both the Captor and the Player's models were created by Fun3DArt and are super beautiful, they were exactly what I was looking for.
Of course there had to be some programmer art involved, and all of the items in-game have crudely drawn icons to go with them! (totally on purpose, I promise)
Audio & Video:
Booted up Cubase for the first time in a while to create the BGM for this game! It's a really simple track, but it was nice being back in my favourite DAW just messing about for a bit
The cutscene videos were made using Sony Vegas Pro, another program which I used a lot as a teen but haven't really touched since. The cutscenes were made by taking an in-game screenshot, editing the colour a bit, and putting some text on top for the story.
Overall, I'm happy with how this project turned out. I would've loved to add more of a risk/reward style of gameplay, but alas - time restraints.
Aviary can be found Hereup on my itch.io page - I hope you enjoy it! (´• ω •`) ♡
See you soon! (and hopefully not in another years time!)
