SOMBER

 After your husband and son were reported to have passed in a tragic car accident Trin finds herself at loss. Not sure what to do the past few days have been a blur...until one night everything became clear...


As of 11.3 post mortem:

Vanishing Summit to SOMBER A post mortem Original Goal: Create a narrative-driven game from start to end (very, very, very short) to practice and learn design using ue4, and ue4 blueprints (node-based code)

Starting this game jam roughly with a week to go I felt ok about the time frame and due date since I had already been struck with the annual “it's time to make a spooky game” itch striking again and I was already putting in work on a horror short game. After starting the Jam officially I was working on a horror game that was an odd “fantasy-horror” that involved a man sailing the clouds in a giant automated blimp above gas-ridden earth. The ship was planned to land the player on islands for them to explore and ultimately place a tracker at the core of each location when things would slowly turn for worse when mysterious robed figures would find their way onto the blimp and haunt the player during their mission. Ultimately I got a little tired of the idea and felt it was still a little out of my skill level so I went down a different path.

Storytelling with limits and guidance:

Storytelling is a desire of mine but a skill I need to sharpen as well, when setting the world up I started to create a basic understanding of what story could be after awhile I happened to share this project with my friend Greg to see what he thought so far of this build and its direction. He seemed to like the idea and wanted to take the role of fleshing out the story which I thought was the best thing considering I had a week at this point to get something tangible together. He quickly got to work on laying out a story structure that would help us guide the design. I worked on environments and tried to share a little story building that, at the end, we had a small story baked into the objects, locations in the world. If we are to continue designing on Somber, the next thing would be to fill it with more events and connect the narrative (amongst a plethora of other key aspects). 

Use of an engine kit and premade assets:

When starting this I wanted to have a focus on building the world and building a place for the player to move through with sights on building environmental storytelling and dialogue-based storytelling but knew that the best way to achieve that with limited time and limited knowledge on coding (or visual code: ue4 blueprints) I found a template called horror engine template on the ue4 marketplace. This template has plenty of great starter-friendly functions and even assets itself, and I’d highly encourage you to download it and spend some time in the demo world tinkering with the mechanics. There seems to be a negative aspect to this as well from some of the indie community saying that if you're using premade assets or mechanics, in general, it’s lazy or uncreative...which I would highly protest that thought saying that if your aim is to create a game it's definitely very beneficial to learn each aspect of the process from coding to art design but to take that journey is completely up to you what path your stride just as long as you show credit if you’re shipping or selling a game. I feel that things like an engine kit that’s designed to help you steer should deserve their acknowledgment and in any case, you should make whatever you design your own (for an integrity aspect as well as legal one).

Storytelling, Time management, and learning to learn:

Greg Marciano (Lead Writer):

In all honesty, I didn't know where to start the story. I was given a tiny snowball from my friend and I tried to turn that snowball into an avalanche. It would stay a snowball in the end despite the efforts put forth. And that's okay, I learned that it isn't easy to make something from nothing, it takes a lot of skill and requires a lot of patience. This story being the first for me in a video game sense is something I would like to carry into future projects and see grow into something greater. The Initial goal and goal making and learning enough to plan with an educated guess:

this game was created to push me to create something with a “skeleton”, something that when finished would feel like it had a beginning, middle, end, and what we landed on was something id say showed potential but ultimately achieved a stepping off point for storytelling. when starting a new hobby, skill, job, etc you're faced with learning the basics of the task needed and from there you build your knowledge. The best thing gained from this experience was feeling like the path to creating a full game makes more sense and I can better understand the time different portions of design could take.

after making several maps and creating assets to fit the areas it became clear to me that there isn’t a set-in-stone time frame but there is a level of time that's needed for detail. one day I had almost 10 hours to work solely on design and I was able to make a few assets that I was very proud of. now you might say “10 hours wtf are you doing with that time” though i'd argue that if you testing new designs and building them from scratch there's plenty of room to allow this timeframe. I created 3 (only 3) shacks in on days work, and they are not perfect but they are unique and served to push me to create a world asset that I felt like was serving the game’s mechanics (granted those mechanics are simply a ai enemy that should be able to move freely around the space and access the same places the player could. the shacks needed to also share a look and feel. when all is said and done the three shacks resulted in a short portion that could be used (with the polishing of course) and possibly reused in future games.

Though this project could possibly carry on growth it's been great to be able to have one thing to keep iterating on and learning both the skills needed to navigate design and to learn how the world will look. After this I'll be more capable to assess the scope of future ideas from an early stage, my hopes are to learn how to design a “game design document” (or “treatment”) for future projects to mentally work out the look, layout, functions, events, background, player pov in greater detail which can help guide the entire build and ultimately allow for even more improvisations within a form of structure and still maintain creativity. Thank you for taking the time to either read this, watch the walkthrough, or play the game we’ve created so far for the DEVTOBER 2021’ game jam. I hope you were able to glean something worthwhile from this and I look forward to playing and doing the same to your games too!