Hey there, it's Balint. You're probably wondering just what this game is and in all honesty I'm wondering myself too.

This game is one of the games I completed in the last semester of my college career. It started in a class I took called "Small Game Lab" a class that consisted of small groups of people getting together with the sole purpose of making a game. It was a fun experience and taught me a lot about management and allowed me to hone in even more on my programming skills. At least after I essentially failed the first project (more of a personal failure).

The conception of this game started when me and my friend, Vinay, partnered up for this last project. We both had our capstones (a major final project at our university) and I additionally had a whole other class where I had to make yet another game (Level Design 2). To compromise, I combined the two class projects so I could use it for either and just like that we were off.

Pre-Production

To keep with the theme of my project guidelines for Level Design 2, I suggested a horror game. After brief coercion discussion with Vinay, we began the pre-production phase of the game. In a previous Unreal project, I developed a camcorder mechanic that utilized the Scene Capture Component 2D (essentially a camera) object to capture the environment and display it on an object (this being the screen). Going off of this, we began to come up with an idea for a game. Exploring a haunted house? Nah too generic. Exploring a haunted forest? Nope, too cliche. And that's when we settled on it: A game about picking up trash in your house. Sounds pretty simple. right? WRONG. Now you have to keep a lookout for an invisible entity that is incessantly hunting you down. We also suggested some more ideas that didn't make it into the university build of the game: - A time system similar to FNAF - Different Chore Types - Two other monsters - Random power outages rather than a pre-determined one

Production

Moving onto the production phase, I had a big responsibility since I was the sole programmer of the entire game. It was during this phase that I learned even more on how to properly and efficiently partition the time I had to develop two separate game projects. I made wonderful progress because of this. In a few days, I fixed a long-standing issue with the camcorder not being able to display the post-processing effect and I set up the enemy behavior which ended up being heavily modified later on.

Camcorder Breakdown

The camcorder is probably the coolest thing I created for the game. I was heavily inspired from Outlast and I wanted to challenge myself to create that. I could've easily used the Horror Engine project for this, but there's no challenge in that.

I used a Scene Capture Component 2D component to display in real time the view from the camcorder's lens. A Scene Capture Component 2D is essentially a camera that has an output that can be applied as a texture which can then be turned into a material that can be rendered in the player's screen.

With that complete, I moved on to simulating a camera lens as well as the night vision which is technically very simple. With the way I set it up initially, however, the post processing wouldn't apply. I realized later on that I didn't have to set it up the way I did, the model I used was just so janky that putting the cube underneath the camcorder model would severely mess up the dimensions.

Invisible Friend Breakdown

The invisible friend was heavily inspired off of SCP-173 (aka "The Statue" aka "Peanut-boi") and The Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. I programmed its behavior to replicate this kind of behavior. Any time the player looks away the enemy will approach the player while playing a subtle footstep noise which is another way to detect the enemy without the camcorder.

Then of course comes the big end of it all: the jumpscare. I searched the internet for some free sounds and I found two I really liked and decided to layer the two (Did I mention I also do sound design?). On their own, the sounds weren't really... scary... and it was something I was really worried about. But once I layered them... well... I damn near had a heart attack at 1 AM. 

Of course, however, my opinion doesn't matter being the creator and such and so I decided to put my friends through the horror (I'm such a great friend aren't I?). My worries faded once I began to hear them scream or flinch heavily at the unholy abomination jumpscare sound.

Conclusion

Back to reality, I think this was my best project in the class (both for my Level Design 2 and Small Game Lab classes) and it definitely showed with how many people said that they thought it was really cool and definitely horrifying to an extent. Had I had more time I would've tried to implement all the mechanics we cut and I think I would've had an even better product. I might return to this sometime just so I can fully realize the original vision me and Vinay had. Speaking of Vinay, special thanks to him for modeling the characters (even though we didn't use two of them).

I hope those of you who downloaded the game enjoy it and if you have any thoughts or opinions PLEASE leave a comment, I'd love to hear what you think.

Thank you for your time if you read all the way down here.

Much love,

B

(Here's a link to Vinay's stuff on ArtStation, go out and support him: Vinay's ArtStation.)