Start Descending

The jam took place 4.-6.4.2025. This time the themes were antiquity and psychological horror. In our game, the player controls a cone of light attached to a descending elevator to search for antique items in a pitch-dark endless cave. Items can be fished from the cave walls by throwing a plunger on a rope at them. But the items aren't the only things hiding in the cave. The elevator is randomly attacked by hostile creatures trying to prevent the player from stealing the antique valuables. Good thing that the flashlight has a damaging mode to repel the creatures.

Development

I worked with general game art and UI art. My main focus was creating the gameplay assets, and UI design was a secondary task. In Unity we used a pixelating shader to filter all the art assets for a retro look. I used Krita to draw all the game assets and Figma for the UI design and assets. Throughout the drawing process, I also used a pixelating filter in Krita to preview how the item style would look like in the game engine. To implement the UI in Unity, I initially attempted to use the UI Toolkit. However, as time was running short and I encountered several issues due to my lack of experience with the toolkit, I decided to switch to the uGUI system. The progress bars needed three stacked images: the background, the filling, and the frame. The background image served as a mask for the filling, preventing any overflow from being visible. I also designed a separate frame for the textboxes and the start button, which was sliced in Unity in a specific way to ensure better scalability.