Sour Dreams (TheMaddsHatter)

Description:

Everyone has dreams, but can you manage to escape the ones that are out for you?

You will have control over a small child in the midst of what seems like a rather pleasant dream. But.. it soon turns out to have a far more sinister tone as the game goes along. You will be able to do escape-room-like puzzles, where the player must navigate through different rooms, find three keys, and escape their dream. There will be dialogue to help you with hints on how to solve each dream, but you must act fast!

Controls:

Point the Mouse and Click to move and interact with the environment

Press N to open up your Notebook where recent hints are kept.

Press ESC to exit certain interactables 

Sour Dreams Postmortem

Team 8

Soured Dreams was a lot of fun to work on. We had a lot of things go really well, but not without their challenges. 

What went right?

Among some of the things that went well was the composition of the group. From the start, everyone was excited and ready to work. When one teammate had to take a step back from the game, either due to health reasons or for other assignments, another person was more than willing to step in. Our group had several strong coders and artists, which helped the production of the game run smoothly. After the artists finished the level design, the coders stepped in to handle the UI and mechanics. One artist worked on sound design and creation while the other helped polish the levels. Implementing mechanics wasn’t too hard, especially since coders would work on them in a private room before transferring them to the game.

What went wrong/what problems did you face?

While things went well, we hit a few roadblocks. There were changes to the game that were made on the fly, as creating the game revealed we either needed more or less of certain entities. We should have started on the coding aspect, instead of waiting for the level designers to finish. The puzzle implementation took longer than expected, but we also did start the process later than intended. 

How did you overcome those problems?

The good thing is we anticipated setbacks and gave ourselves a week of extra time that we could use as needed. 

What changes were made and why?

We did end up changing the game from the original concept a little bit. We originally thought the puzzles would be more chase-scene-like, but we wanted to keep it with the puzzle aspect. We added dialogue with interactable NPCs. The Hallway scene wasn’t part of the original plan, but the concept of a boss chasing the character was. Creating a maze of doors in level 2 was different from what we intended, but it worked better in the new format. Soundtracks went from 12 to 6 as levels were refined. Most of these issues came up as the game was being created. To help navigate this issue, the team just needed to communicate with others about the idea, and then start working on it once everyone was on the same page. 

What did you learn?

Game 2 presented a big learning opportunity. Switching to a 3D world presented more avenues of creation, but one had to be careful and make sure their game and story made sense with the 3D world. Unity itself was a learning curve, jumping from Gamemaker to the new engine. Some of the concepts were the same, such as parenting, but others were different, like NavMesh. The creation of the game changed as art was used as an interactable device compared to as a background. Working with a team that now had experience with creating a game made it easier to implement ideas and go through the process of game making. They were open to more ideas and were flexible with what could be created in the given time. They also had a better understanding of what components must be either a) created or b) found to be used in the game to create a completed work.

Credits

Level Designers

Katherine Akers

Maddy Youtsey

Coding Crew

Scout Girmscheid

Christopher Merriman

User Interface

Nathan Hayward

Sound Design Implementation

Katherine Akers

Nathan Hayward

Special Thanks to

OpenGameArt -- for SoundFXs and Art

FreeSound -- for SoundFXs

The TA’s and Graders from CPI 211

Professor Selgrad

Links

https://freesound.org/people/CGEffex/sounds/98341/ 

Note: Some sounds were altered and remixed to fit the appropriate theme. We do not claim credit to the original sounds used.

Concept Art: