Trapped was my entry for Ludum Dare 22; a game making competition where you have 48 hours to make a game independently from Scratch! You can play the game here. It was placed within the top 10 for graphics and in the top 50 overall, pretty good considering it was my first attempt at a game jam!

The competition theme was ‘Alone’ - a tough one for sure! I ended up trying to create a spooky first person castle exploring game where you had to escape from a Castle. This was my first time using Unity game engine so it was quite a learning curve. I decided to focus mainly on graphics and art over gameplay quality for this jam.

To start with I set about creating a basic tileset for the Castle, the plan being that I would snap all of the different castle assets together in different ways to form a much bigger and more complicated building. I created a castle wall, floor, ceiling, carpet, door, light, portcullis and some crates to throw around.

Next I got all of these lovely art assets imported into Unity and I started placing and combining them into a large Castle scene. This seemed to work quite well when combined with some point lights and some linear fog in the distance to make the Castle all dark and spooky. I wish I had known about Unity’s Lightbaking tools at the time as this would have made the graphics look a lot better! Creating all of these assets and getting them imported correctly took me most of the first day.

The final day was spent getting some basic gameplay working. This involved setting up a basic first person camera and a mouse drag system that would let you drag objects in the world realistically to allow the player to look and move around the world.

I also set up the door levers and the portcullis animations along with some tutorial text and a simple trigger to reset the level at the end of the game.

In summary I think I hit the target I aimed for which was to create a nice looking game within such a short timeframe, however due to a massively over sensitive first person camera the controls left a lot to be desired! I plan to focus much more on gameplay in future game jams.