Designing

Final Hour was apart of the 1-bit Game Jam on November 11th-19th 2023. This was the first Game Jam I had particpated in, and while it was full on and pretty intense, it was extremely satisfying. The team consitsed of 8 people.

Design: Blake Andrews (Narrative), Brodie Frazier (Level, Sound)

Programming: Tom Evangelou (Gameplay, UI), Phoenix Marsh (Shader)

Art: Phoenix Marsh (Character Modelling, Technical), Ben Hunter (Character Design, 2D, UI), Kaine Solace (Environment), Jeremaiah Medwin (Art Support)

Music by John Sharp (@jjohnsharp - Instagram/TikTok)

I had wrote the story over over 3 days under the theme of You Start With Everything And End With Nothing. I took 3 days off work to smash out most of the writing cooped up in my room, running on caffeine at the start of the week long timeline of getting this game developed and released. Straight away we had decided on the theme of the Game Jam being used narratively. I was passionate about wanting to create a narrative expierience and this felt like the perfect opportunity to push myself, and the team was totally on board and happy to support me.

After the script was finished and Tom had created the dialogue tree for me to set up with all the characters, it was my job to go in and link up each bit of dialogue and dialogue option for the player in game, and this took a lot of time. For that week of my life I was either at work, in class, or spending 99% of my free time working on this as much as I humanly could before I crashed. 

Once the dialogue was getting the setup for the characters, we eventually came into a few bugs to which Tom worked very hard to iron out ASAP, and even involved me going back and doing some small rewrites to make some sure there weren't any oddities for the player in terms of completing fetch quests. When this was completed, I went around and placed all the unique assets that were graciously modeled by Kaine, and had Tom help me set them up. 

While spending time playtesting all the dialogue I could in game to make sure every path the player could take would absolutely work, I noticed that a lot of areas in game that didn't cast shadows or have interseting shapes made it very hard for the player to realise if they were moving?

After this I spent a lot of time in game helping build and detail the envrioment with whatever tools I had. I quickly discovered that myself trying to make models in Blender was a tedious task, and was much easier if I built primitives in Unity. Yes it wasn't an elegant solution, but we were crunched for time and I wanted to do the abolute most I could provide. 

When all of this was done and I was totally exhausted, I spent a little extra time fleshing out the narrative more and more by writing in things the player could examine by interacting, and even including some small easter eggs for my keepsake. I actually have a photo of Tim Schafer hidden in every project I have worked on!