Skull's Haunted Mansion was a game created for the itch.io game jam for Halloween 2021. This was the first game jam I ever joined, and I took on the role of the game designer and programmer. I was part of a team of three designers, one was an artist, and the other was a game audio designer. For the game jam, we had only one week to create a playable game to submit. The theme of the jam was "sacrifice," and so I went ahead and designed this idea. Below you can check out the simple GDD we worked on. This would have been better if I had a template to use. However, I had only recently been introduced to GDDs at the making of this game and so was still unfamiliar and just decided to do the best I could in creating something that resembled one and helped us organize our thoughts.
Below you can view the initial level design for the main area and the first dungeon. Unfortunately, neither was implemented since we were short on time we went with a simpler layout.
Here in the first gif, you can see these floating collectible candies. I developed this and made them spin slowly so that players know there is something they can do with them. They are automatically collected when the player overlaps, and in the top left, a cady score is updated. I also scripted the the movement for the player and the camera. Honestly, I am not too pleased with the movement script, and when I revisit this game, I plan to fix the movement and make the camera linked to the mouse instead of the directional keys.
There are a lot of bugs that need to be fixed, and I plan to go back and fix a lot of the bugs and also rework many of the mechanics and features. Now that I have graduated and learned a lot more since making this. I now know new ways to make this project better.
This is the core mechanic that also matches the theme of the game jam. Since we went for a more friendly game look, we decided to ensure the sacrifice was also something not too gory
and family-friendly. In Halloween spirit, we chose to go with a pumpkin that would be sacrificed to unlock doors. Each door requires more pumpkins to be sacrificed before the door becomes unlocked.
I worked on the combat, and though it came out alright for my first try, there is still tons of work needed to develop this to completion. For one, I wanted the enemies to take more damage before dying. At the time, I needed more time to implement this, and if I can recall, I might not have known how to go about putting it in. Now though, if I were to update the combat, I would add either a little life bar above their heads like I have done in my personal project. The other way would be having the player lock on to a single target like how it is done in WoW and have the enemy's info displayed in the top right of the screen.
Next, I would give the projectiles a damage value, and the enemies would have that damage applied to their hit points with each successful hit.
This gif just shows the level and how it changes once you complete the first doors dungeon area. The starting area opens up and reveals more pumpkins and another enemy. The new door also shows that the sacrifice has increased.
Other bugs and improvements that this game needs include a death volume underneath each level that kills the player and resets them to the last checkpoint location. In the gif above, there is an audio issue where the background music is repeated, causing the audio to become unbearable to listen to. Regarding the audio and SFX, a master audio system would be ideal for implementing to allow players to adjust the volume during gameplay. The overall gameplay loop could be polished and refined, and the difficulty could be increased. Since there is no longer any time restraint for the project, some added levels and mechanics would help to round out the game.
