A horror game in which you have to solve puzzles to escape a deserted library. View project on itch.io

I made this project with Matthijs Bruins in one week for the "SCREAM JAM 2023". We both thought about the design of the game, but I focused mainly on the programming, while Matthijs focused on the art. We searched the internet for CC0-licensed assets when we didn't have time to make them ourselves.

Since the theme of the jam was horror, we chose the central emotion: 'fear'. We then thought of several game elements that we could use to make players experience this emotion, such as fog (so players begin to fill in the details for themselves), unsettling sounds, no combat (so the player is powerless), and a changing maze of bookshelves. We also thought about the setting and narrative of the game.

We thought about the death mechanic a lot, since we felt that repetitive gameplay could easily remove the emotion we were going for. So we decided to penalize the player on death, by randomly placing all the player's items, and regenerating the maze using this simple tesselation algorithm, which I implemented in Unity. 

When we finished the project, I let my parents play it. My mother is a teacher, and she immediately saw the potential of putting some educational elements in the game. So, I remade the puzzles based on exercises her students where currently working on. It was very nice to hear that the students enjoyed the game!