Hi everyone,

I've had a ton of fun playing all of your games, there are some true masterpieces submitted for this jam.

I wanted to talk about our journey creating Storage Secrets - A cozy storage-hunting simulator with a horror twist!

After the theme was announced, my dev partner Adam came up with the idea for a storage-wars type game where you bid on abandoned containers and then sell the items you find in order to progress through the game. I couldn't help but suggesting a horror twist to the game (you'll have to play to see for yourself).

I typically solo-develop 2D pixel art games, but for this jam (and especially this idea) I wanted to branch out into 3D and have a little fun. I ended up having A LOT of fun designing the levels and writing code to get this up and running. For the 3D models, we used pre-made assets found online since neither of us are capable of churning out enough to fulfill this game idea within a week. For the code, we wrote it from the ground up in Unity.

The starting area of the game is the outdoor space where you can view all of the containers for sale. Each container interior is a separate scene in Unity - which presented some challenges retaining data as we go between the rooms. Things like money, Locked/Unlocked status, and Items picked up all had to be saved in order to move between scenes seamlessly and have the game be playable.

Our solution and savior was a GameManager script that was a singleton and utilized DontDestroyOnLoad. This let the object persist between scenes - and any data we needed to preserve we added to this script, and then checked it when needed. This ended up being a great solution as we did not want to spend time developing a proper save system since our game would be played in-browser mostly.

Another handy tool was a Scene State Manager that I created - since the state of the starting area needed to change after certain events in the game. Different lighting, Voice Over, and Music could be set to each of the states and easily changed based on current data from the GameManager.

We wanted to create a large contrast between the beginning parts of the game and when the horror elements come in. Our wonderful composer Megollyen perfectly captured the vibe we were going for and was able to help us transition from happy-go-lucky to horror very skillfully.

I would love if anyone else wants to play the game before the jam is over - whether or not you decide to rate it, I truly believe that this game is something special and I am so proud of what we made.

Thanks all, and be sure to link your game below so I can check it out!

Game: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2525633

Soundtrack: https://soundcloud.com/megollyen/sets/storage-secrets-brackeys-game?utm_source=c...