Jo's Nightmare

Game Overview:

Jo’s Nightmare is a single-player strategy defense game where the player must defend young Jo’s nightlights from being destroyed by his nightmares. The game takes place in Jo's house but with a dreamscape twist. Everything in the house is childish and the walls look like they've been scribbled on with crayon! Each enemy has a unique way of being dealt with, just make sure to keep track of them all!

Engine: Unity 3D

Platform: Windows/PC

Team size: 3

Tools used: Unity, Photoshop, Blender

Role: Game Designer and Artist

Itch.io: Check it out here!

My contributions to the team:

Helped ideate gameplay loops and core player mechanics.
Created concept art for the house, enemies, and playable character
Helped design enemy behaviors and test AI during development
Designed the house level using Blender and made custom wall textures to fit the scribbled wall theme. I also added lots of environmental storytelling
3D modeled and textured the models for the house furniture and nightlights.
Created all of the UI assets for the game
Playtested and reported bugs to our programmer as we continued prototyping
Designed a written tutorial for the player at the start of the game

Process

Inspirations & Research

We used a few games as references such as Jo's House (haha), Balloons Tower Defense, and FNAF.

Jo's House inspired us to add the mechanic of moving furniture to block the enemies path and the condition that the game wont start if enemies don't have a direct path to Jo's Room which holds the nightlights.
BTD6 was our initial idea, but we wanted to create a 3D space to walk around in
FNAF inspired us to create various enemy behaviors and different ways of dealing with them, as well as being nightmare-y.

Concept Art

I created some concept art for our idea and pitch presentation. The player character would be a toy soldier, tasked with defending Jo from nightmares. The stuffed bear would attack the player, but occasionally switch into his stuff animal form, leaving time to escape. The attic monster would be like FNAF marionette puppet, meaning the player would have to occasionally make sure the attic is close or keep it from opening all the way. Lastly, the kitchen concept I made was to showcase our theme of "seen through the eyes of a child", where a child's idea of a kitchen would be a plastic kitchen they may have played with. That is why the appliances are bright and fun!

Enemy Designs:

In the end, we kept all of the concepts except for the attic monster, and instead added two more enemies, the skeleton and the spider.

The bear follows the player and can stun them if they get close enough to bite. There are honey pots around the house that the player can break so that the bear will be distracted for a few moments.
The spider scurries to a few set points found on around the house. The player must bonk the spider before it is able to reach and destroy a nightlight.
The skeleton is always set on a direct path to the nightlights, so the player must whack the skeletons head off in order to buy some time

Building the level in Blender

This part is what took up most of my time during the duration of this project. I created a 2 floor house, with all of the rooms having unique crayon scribble textures.

I started by sketching out house layouts on paper, which I then transformed into a small blockout on blender.
I designated areas in the house for the monsters to spawn in, such as the skeleton coming from the basement, bear in the garage, and spider in the kitchen.
I did some preliminary tests of transporting the assets into Unity. I utilized backface culling to save some space and loading time.

Upstairs layout

Downstairs layout

Skeleton spawns from basement

Hole in garage door for the Bear spawn

Spider's "nest" in the kitchen

Texturing and art style progress

Our aim was for this game to be silly, with undertones that make the player think "something is wrong here." The textures on the walls of the house are made to reflect a child's drawing. I had a lot of fun with this, since I usually feel pressured to make perfect assets, where as this I still worked hard, but perfect assets were never the goal.

I used blender texture paint and installed an add on for stylized brushes, for this I used the crayon brush.
I was not as familiar with UV wrapping and texture painting before this project, so looking back I can see I've learned, and especially how I can make things way more efficient.

Below are some early examples of the texture progress, where I was messing around with the brush and colors. I tried to keep everything very bright and vibrant, so those darker more mysterious colors that indicates something's a bit off stand out more.

Environmental storytelling

After I got more comfortable, I was able to add more fun features such as Jo's take on some famous artwork. On some walls, I also implemented little notes that the players can find and read. Since our player will be moving furniture to black paths, making the assets and area they are exploring fun was a main priority.

Here are some examples of this done by the textured walls alone, without the assets

On the walls of the parents bathroom.... somethings is a little creepy.

Going further into the shower, there is visible blood and warning signs about not trusting "them."

Jo draws some famous paintings that are hung in the kitchen. On the table he makes notes of his and your spot. Two of the plates are eating something suspicious...

The Dad's office has a few hidden features: The google search is "how to hide a body", the "I love dad" paper is ripped, and there is a knife found in the open drawer

Furniture assets

Before moving on to the final house, I will showcase some of the assets I made and textured in blender. The assets themselves also have some silly additions and also deeper meanings. For example:

First completed set of assets

Jo's room with his among us bed

(Early version of parents bathroom) A bloodied sink can be found, with a bloody handprint on the handle.

The bathtub found in Jo's Bathroom references the bear as well as a dinosaur that we almost were gonna put into the game!

Lighting and Final Version of the House

While the lighting unfortunately did not make it into the final build due to some odd bugs, I still have the Unity stylized version with some screenshots. Given the time constraint and learning the most efficient ways to UV map and texture paint, I would say the house turned out pretty cool! I am eager to keep creating more and step away from the boxy low poly style for a while.

Upstairs final top down view

Downstairs final top down view

Screenshots of in game setups and lighting:

Lessons Learned:

I learned a ton from this project, especially about level and environmental design. As someone who loves filling space, I feel I may have skipped a preparation step and went straight without much prep, which in turn led me to having to spend more time on the house. After this project, I found my skills to prepare and blockout for prototyping purposes has greatly increased. On top of it all, I learned a lot about task management and communication with my teammates, who I still work with to this day as we continue to grow our skills together!