A former UCA gradaute following his creative passions in game jams, artwork and mods.
ABOUT
Nine to Fright was created for the 2021 UCA Winter Game Jam by me (Programmer and Lead Artist) and Jake Cheung (Environment Artist). It is a short, arcade-styled game where you work as a monster in their office day job, completing various tasks that pop up while keeping your hunger and stamina bars topped up.
During the short 3 minute run, tasks will periodically appear with a timer, the player must interact with the task before the timer runs out or lose some of their points and multiplier. Upon interacting with the task, the player will be prompted with a minigame they must finish to continue. Furthermore, the player has an energy and hunger bar to keep on top of, the former affecting walking speed and the latter affecting the difficulty of most tasks.
There are a total of 6 minigames in this game:
Letter prompts appear on screen and the player must hit the corresponding key on their keyboard (Note: there is an oversight where caps lock will affect the detection of what key the player inputs)
FILING
The player is given a coloured sheet of paper, and has to press the corresponding folder number (press 2 for green, 3 for blue etc.). Occasionally the player is given a miscoloured paper, and must throw it into the recycling (by pressing 4)
PHONE CALL
This task involves watching the player character talking in jibberish for a few seconds.
MOPPING
Press Q and E to move the slider back and forth a set number of times.
FIXING THE PRINTER
Mash space to fill the bar.
MOVING BOXES
The player must move the boxes from one end of the level to the other, the player has free movement but can't take on any tasks until this
CONCEPTING
The prompt for this 5 day game jam was "You are the monster", a theme that had a lot of potential. At first, I thought of a simple top-down adventure game that would have the player start as a ghost, possessing weak enemies to chip down stronger ones to possess. The player would progressively work their way up through the enemy heirarchy, and would need to complete the map objective (which would have been either rescuing villagers or activating blood altars) before the sun came up.
I also considered a spin on this enemy progession idea, starting as a slime instead and would morph into stronger enemies via levelling. The player would be able to branch out to various different enemy types, and the objective would remain mostly the same. Unfortunately I believed it would have proven maybe a bit too tricky to design and implement a "skill tree" of enemies in the time we had available.
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The second concept was a lot more comedic: I took the literal "You are the monster" theme and drafted an idea where you played a monster in an office. Unlike the final game, this early concept was a lot more sim-like, having to manage not only a hunger and energy meter, but also a thirst and bladder meter. The movement also would have been a lot more like a point and click and slower paced.
This concept would eventually be tweaked and adjusted, such as only 2 resource bars for simplicity and having direct player control to give a more intuitive control scheme for a hectic game.
ARTWORK
Due to the nature of game jams, the artstyle needed to be easy to quickly develop assets with. For the characters, we would go with a loose cartoony style that didn't require perfect lineart or any shading; this allowed me to produce a large number of assets easily. On the environment art side, me and my teammate established to have a 3D background in orthographic view, this would help add depth and easily tweak elements of the scene.
The resulting artstyle came out looking rather charming, I really grew to like how the main character looks. According to players, the style reminded them of old flash games they used to play.
CONCLUSION
With this being longer than your typical game jam, there is probably a lot more we could have done with the time we had. However, I feel that it meant that we could pace ourselves better, giving us time to reflect on how development was going and refine the final game. Asides minor things like using basic Unity UI here and there and the issue with the E-Mail minigame, there isn't really a lot in here that I would pick apart, I feel quite proud of the final result.
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In the jam's rankings, with 30% of the vote our game placed 2nd out of 12 submissions. When our team finished, we were discussing how keen we were on making this into a full game, with many various ideas such as co-op and more tasks to do. I hope someday we can develop this idea, and for future game jam entries to stand up to the quality we managed to achieve here.