Develomare – How I Made It? (Part 1)

I made the game called Develomare for the BlackThronProd (BTP) Game Jam #1 as I mentioned that in the previous post.

But how?

As you guys know that I am a fan of Unity Game Engine. Therefore, I watch the video tutorials on YouTube that are related to Unity Game Engine. A few months ago, I stumbled across a YouTube Channel called BlackThornProd. He makes awesome Unity tutorial videos.

One day, he decided to do a Game Jam and he posted a video about it. I watched it and decided to join the Game Jam. The theme was beautiful. It was “Game Development”.

It was a 7-day Game Jam. Unfortunately, I was one day late when I saw the video. So, I already had one less day to make the game. In other words, there was no ‘Day 1’.

Day 2 and 3:

I immediately opened Unity but when the empty text box asking for project name appears in front of me, I just couldn’t think of the game idea. It’s not like I don’t have ideas. The problem is that I have lots of ideas.

Recently, I watched some of the games made in Unity. One of them is Inside by Playdead. I really like the art style of the game and the overall gameplay. The game’s ending is something. No spoilers. Hehe.

I wanted to make a game like Inside. Of course, it is such a big deal to create such a game. I obviously couldn’t make a game like that in a mere 6 days. But I wanted to touch its art style and environment feel. I somehow wanted to bring it in my game. And I feel like it is possible.

I named the game, DreamScreen.

Now, I need 3D models. And I am just so bad at making them. I am still bad when it comes to modeling and stuff in Blender. Thanks to Unity’s Polybuilder, it seems a little bit possible.

I made the character model in pieces. For each piece, it is just a simple cube. All I did is change the position of an edge/2 vertices. Then, I put them in a sensible hierarchy in order to animate it.

Character Model

Hierarchy of Character Model

It is not the best. But it seems okay to me. After all, it is made for the game that I have to complete in the next 5 days.

I made a very simple environment. Again used cubes only. Roof, walls, floor and some columns here and there. I added some square holes in the roof. Then, I set the directional light in such a way that the light passing through the holes in the roof, makes a pleasing angle. I added Unity’s Post Processing Stack (Version 1, not 2). With that, I added Bloom, set the Color Grading to ‘Filmic’ and tinkered around with Depth Of Field settings.

I want my lights to be volumetric. So, I added Aura – Volumetric Lighting from the Unity Asset Store, of course. But it didn’t work the way I want it to be. I settled with white square Sprites. The idea might seem odd but it looked way better than I expected it to be.

 

A shot during the game.

Now, I want my characters to have idle and walk animations. Thanks to my hierarchy setup, the animation seems easy and I did it pretty fine. The animation takes most of my time. There is no IK or anything like that. Unfortunately, I find it hard to fix the foot digging into the ground. But it was not that much noticeable. Programming the walk was a piece of cake. I added the step sound and the ambient sound as well.

Animating bunch of cubes to make it look like someone’s walking…

Then, I slept.

If you have already played Develomare, you might say that I am talking about some other game here. That is because there is some serious twist at the end of Day 4.

Stay tuned for the next post and take care!