Curlington

Level design planning document
GIF
Character rotation of Timmy, the player character

Inspiration

We wanted to recreate the horrifying feeling of being lost somewhere as a kid, like a department store or a mall. Public spaces like those can seem really terrifying when you're younger and we wanted to try and capture this horror through gameplay. RPGs like Earthbound and Undertale were big inspirations for us, as they both do an amazing job of dancing the line between childlike wonder and abject terror. The Binding of Isaac was another inspirational game for us, with its terrifying environments and boss designs.

What it does

In the game, you play as Timmy, a 10 year old child looking for his dad in a Curlington department store. Timmy is controlled with the WASD keys, and must wander through the seemingly endless store, fighting haunted clothing along the way.

How we built it

Our team of four collaborated both in-person and over Discord to create the game. We used Unity to assemble the game, writing out C# scripts in Visual Studio and using GitHub for version control. All of our art was created in Piskel and in Krita.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge was coordinating and dividing the work between everyone involve. For most of us, this was our first game jam, so we had to learn the process and figure out what everyone was best at. Communicating things like what scripts, game objects, and art we each needed was a challenge at first, but by the end of the jam we got a hang of it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of how well we were able to realize our creative vision -- a terrifying, haunted department store.

What we learned

All of us got much more experienced at using Unity and GitHub over the course of the jam, and we all pushed the bounds of our current skills. Another big takeaway was learning to work as a team, as we had to become much more coordinated over the process of the jam.