As I expected, the scale I initially planned is too large to accomplish in a month. So I scale down the game into only the player as the demon using tall grass to evade light or villager’s sight and assassinate all the villagers. This goal is way more achievable and make the game compact and I can polish the experience more at this scale.
Follow up I’m going to introduce every aspect of the game.
The two main tools I used to create this game are Unity3D and MagicVoxel.
Unity is the game engine I’ve worked with since my starting day of trying out game development. No big reason to choose it, it is my only engine I’m familiar with. Not bold enough to switch to Godot on this project. I’ve tried it this summer on GMTK GameJam 2024, I can’t understand its logic of object and scene so I gave up learning and switching to it.
MagicVoxel is a 3D voxel editor that I used to create every 3D model asset in the game. This is the solution that came up with me since I used to play Minecraft A LOT. MagicVoxel can export obj files which is capable of importing them into Unity. It is a great match of what I’m good at. I’m really a builder person in Minecraft, it is somewhat easy for me to do model by this method.
As I imagined, the level design of puzzle games will always be the pain in the ass part of designing one. So I tried to make a paper prototype to try out if the mechanics work or not. For me it didn’t went well since the concept is already too complicated even without the resource/fear mechanics. This is one of the reason I scaled down the game mechanics into only the stealth and light/vision part, because it is visually straight forward and achievable.
⬆️ Paper Prototype
Here is the paper prototype that I used. There are the units, demon and villagers, the soldier like unit which I planned to perform different interactions didn’t work. Also there are small tokens of fear counters which also got cancelled. The effigy unit, also cancelled. But the grid base, vision range mechanics and the tall grass made it to the final game which is nice. The rest of the mechanics I can’t even handle them on the paper prototype phase, I’m overwhelmed by them. Starting small is a better choice in the end of the day.
⬆️ In-game screenshot
Compare to the prototype, I will say the essence is preserved.
As I mentioned, all the assets are made by me using MagicVoxel. Here I’ll go over some details about the models.