In Invasive you are trying to recover a file from a friend’s office, but little do you know an alternate dimensional creator has broken loose within the facility.
Controls: WASD: Move; Mouse: Look around; E: Pickup objects; Q: Quit
I worked on the back story and the design and progression of the location, as well as the programming for the collectibles, paranormal actions, and monster movement. I also created the audio for the game. There was another person working on the game who made the art assets, programmed the doors, lighting, and animations.
Reason
Invasive was made for the Haunted PS1 Summer of Screams game jam, where the goal was to create a scary game within a month, from July 17th 2020, to August 31st 2020.
Goals
Since we had more time than previous game jams, I really wanted to develop a strong back story and do some in-depth level design. Not being too familiar with AI and navigation, I wanted to push myself to create a system where the monster could follow you at certain times, and create an easy solution for controlling the monster’s travel.
Challenges
Even though we were allotted a longer amount of time, both I and my teammate ran into some life problems that required us to cut a few things. We were going to have multiple kinds of weapons, a larger area, and more narrative story telling. Having it be my first time creating a horror game, I had to figure out a way to make the player more anxious and incorporate more scare tactics.
Solutions
Due to time constraints, we decided to cut the backyard area and basement. Both of these areas were fully made, but they were just too large of a scale and caused the game to lose its pacing. We also had to cut the gun, radio, and metronome that we had planned for these different areas. This was due partly from cutting the areas because I planned out a kind of miniature Metroidvania for the level design where players had to backtrack. I also didn’t like the idea of having the player die and restart because it lost the tension, so we removed the gun and had only had the player interact with the creature at the very end.
Reflection
I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish within the game, especially during the last week when we changed the entire layout of the game. I think if we didn’t have outside personal issues happen, and if I didn’t work on another game at the time, we could have been able to playtest and create a deeper game. There was a lot of praise towards the sound design, which I’m proud of creating.
