Title: Free Candy

Genre: First Person Horror.

Project Overview: So, this is the first game that I'm attempting to make outside of tutorials. Going with a horror game as the concept seems pretty easy (Enter spooky place, get pursued by spooky thing, escape the spooks). My attempt at the "Free" theme for this jam is that the player will be lured into danger by the promise of free candy graffitied on the walls, because who wouldn't walk into an abandoned building for a free Cadburys Creme Egg.

Project Goals: To make a single level with a monster of some sort that chases you around. Hoping to make it at least twenty minutes in length. Really just making this to prove to myself that I can make something without needing a tutorial to guide me along each step of the way (Although you can be sure that I'll have to go back to my old projects to try and remember how things work).

Day 1: Used Probuilder to make a prototype area for the start of my Level

The idea is that the player walks through these creepy alleyways with sounds triggering behind them to indicate that they are being followed. They get to a dead end, with an open door leading into a room with "free candy" inside. Upon entering they fall through the floor and enter the main area of the game.

Plan for Day 2: To finish building the underground area, gonna make it three floors going deeper and deeper until you find a stairway leading back up to the surface where you can escape.

Any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated: Really want to ask anyone with experience making these kinds of games if I should make the intro area a little longer in order to build suspence a little more. The first real scare will be them falling through the floor and it shouldn't be to much work for me to make it longer.

Day 2: So as with most plans, it didn't survive contact with the enemy. The enemy in this case being a power outage that lost me a few hours of progress. Wasn't as big a deal as I had initially feared however, as I had only really been grey boxing out my lower levels and after taking a break I was able to get back to it.

I've only gone with two floors, rather than the three I had planned as I just kind of ran out of ideas of what to put into all that space. I have a good idea of what I want the flow of the level I've got to be, and I can always come back and change it later.

Plan for Day 3, 4, 5 and 6: Well unfortunately I'm back to working twelve hour shifts over the next four days so will get very little time for deving. Hoping I can at least search around for some textures I can use for the walls and floors. On Day 7 When I'm back, the plan is for me to add those textures to the level. Get rid of the faces I dont need so the tunnels actually connect, and add some lighting to my level.

Day 7: Back again! So while working my soul crushing job this week, I began to worry about the fact that I hadn't made much progress over those first two days and that I'd only have around four more days at most to finish everything.

So it was time to knuckle down and get some work done. Today I've connected up all the rooms so that the player can actually walk through them. Then added some textures to my level (I'd never done this part before, which Is the excuse I'm using as to why they look like stock images cropped in MSpaint). After that I played around with the lighting so that my spooky horror game is now actually dark. Finally, made some lamp posts and a torch so that I have some nice spot lighting for things.

Plan For Day 8: Want to make my monster tomorrow. Just something that spawns in on a trigger, chases you around and despawns when you trip another trigger. If I have time I'll add some sound effects that use triggers too.

For now, bed, as I'm friggen tired zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Day 10 early: So sorry to anyway who has been following along. Ended up having a family thing on day 8, then spent ALL of day 9 trying to get one simple bit of scripting to work.

Wanted it so that when you walk over the flash light you would pick it up and it would turn on. I'd never done this before but thought "How hard could it be, just gotta make the flash light on the ground a trigger and when you walk over it turns on the spotlight that's on the player."

Well getting the trigger part of it to work was easy, however I just couldn't seem to get the light to work. The problem was, that the player and the spotlight were two different objects. The player object was the one triggering the collison so I figured I'd make a script with a public bool varible that was set to "true" if the collision occurred, then I'd make another script on the spotlight that would get that variable and turn the light on. But I was having a lot of problems getting that variable from the other script and even more getting the light to go from off to on. Almost all the documentation I found was outdated and I just couldn't get it to work.

Finally I found a youtube vid that pointed out that you could assign objects onto your scripts using the GameObject class. So I deleted the second script and told the first script to activate the spotlight when the trigger was triggered

I feel dumb that It took so long for me to figure all this out, but still, with this in place I can now make a spawning and despawning system for my monster wooooo.

Today was originally going to be the last day I had for deving, but thankfully I'm now going to be able to work right up to the time limit to get this working.

Day 10 Late: Added an enemy that chases the player. And that enemy is..... second hand smoke!

Yeah so I had been learning to make a monster character in blender, but I figured I should get something in place as I was having to learn a lot of stuff to make the monster and I didn't want to run out of time and potentially have nothing.

Also been recording some sound effects.

Day 11 Plan: Implement my sound effects and some ambiance. Put my Smoke monster in the basement where he belongs and have him spawn in and out with those triggers that I now know how to use.

Day 11: Got some sound effects and ambiance into my game and wow those go a long way to actually making it feel like a game.

Added in my spawn and despawn system for my monster too so that's all working great.

Did try to see if I could import something from opengameart.org that I could use instead, but I don't have the first idea of how to get imported models and animations to work.

Day 12 Plan: Make a main menu, pause menu, game over screen and a victory screen. With those things done I can spend the last two days concentrating on adding some assets to make this game look a bit nicer, stomping out bugs and trying to get the game feel right.

Day 13: Whoops, fell asleep before posting Day 12 progress last night so I'll do that now.

Main menu, game over screen and victory screen are all done. No pause screen yet but it's on my to do list. Also added a health system so that you can actually die and I get to show you my game over screen.

Now for the Day 13 stuff.

Made my monster. I call him Meatman, he chases you around while covered in smoke to hide the fact that he doesn't animate.
I've also added some gates that require keys, obstacles, a water dripping particle effect, some wall graffiti, actual candy in my game titled "Free Candy" and have begun to add a gun and shooting system for the final showdown.
A pretty productive day in all, just need one or two more things before it's a playable game.

Day 14 Plan: Finish the shooting mechanics and make my final encounter, change the floor materials, add some more spooks and fix some bugs.
Currently my bottom floor has two of these meat men running around freely as they can just phase through the obstacles I stuck in their way, so gotta fix that.

Day 14: Its done! Link HERE

Phew, It's been a crazy two weeks but I got there. Woke up this morning and thought to myself, "Damn, was I really planning to add a whole shooting feature in a single day". So that got scrapped, now your just gonna have to do your best to solve your differences with the horrible flesh eating meat men, in a non-violent way.

Got my final encounter done pretty early in the day and the game was more or less done at that point. But after doing some playtesting I realised the game really needed a little polish and some bug fixing, so have spent the rest of the day on that.

Over all I'm quite pleased with the final outcome. I manged to scale back my original lofty plans (I see you up there past me, talking about 20 minutes of length, how 'bout 5 if you're lucky.) just enough so that I could get a game released on time. It's nothing incredible, but still it's my first project that I've made without a tutor on udemy guiding me through each step.

I'll do a proper post-mortum of the project tomorrow. I can see light coming from outside, and now with the project over, I think I might try this sleep thing again.