Paranoia - Global Game Jam Content Wrap Up / Post Mortem

Nick January 28, 2013 Art, Development Updates, Games, General Development, Indie Development, Media Assets, News, Paranoia, Programming, Sound and Music No Comments

The past weekend was a crazy one for the Play Nimbus team. Adam, Mike and myself went for a trip to our colleges computer labs for the annual Global Game Jam. We worked hard together to build a game centered around the theme of a heartbeat and came up with a well working demo, Paranoia.

Due to how happy we are of this project, we are going to release pretty much everything that went into the creation of this project and wrapping up with what we did in this post. I’d like to thank everyone that downloaded the game and played it, as well as everyone who participated in this year’s Global Game Jam making it a huge success!

If you want, click here to be brought to the game’s page, where you can download the demo now!

The Game Itself

The game itself is a suspense horror maze game in which your ultimate goal is to just reach the end of the game, and turn the room’s lights on. You play as a guy (yes, just a guy, lol) who must face challenging puzzles and even seme enemies before he reaches the light switch. It all takes place on the same screen, in the same room, meeting the “Inside The Box” diversifier.

Development Screenshots

We took a few screenshots throughout the development of the game, so here they are. Keep in mind, when you see Minecraft… it was purely research and development! Haha.

Atmosphere

Paranoia’s horror-ness comes from the audio and sounds created during the 48 hours it took for us to make the game. We thought that in order for the game to be a compelling horror game, we’d have to have sounds and music that not only fit in with the theme, but also set a horror theme. Below are the two music tracks (only one was used!) that made up the game.

Art and Design

Looks were one thing we were not aiming for when we originally started off designing the game. We learned from previous game jams that we should put more of a focus on what we can develop in that amount of time, and not get art and assets done for things we would be no where near implementing. This time around, we spent a good two, maybe three hours at the beginning just focusing on the design of the game seeing what would work ahead of time, and cutting what wouldn’t. This helped us a lot at getting a completed project in, on-time.

This also allowed us to know exactly what art we’d need to get done and nothing more than what we’d need. We worked on art assets in a pixel style for only when we had the functionality in the game, to make sure we didn’t step ahead of our selves. This oddly worked for us allowing for a more complete game, without a focus on art, but gameplay.

For those curious of our art, below is pretty much all the art we put into the game. We hope you enjoy:

That’s it!

Yup, that’s everything from this game jam. We had a lot of fun, and I hope everyone else that participated did too. You can read up on everything that has to do with Paranoia on the game’s page here, or on Global Game Jam’s website. You can also download it here, or there too.

Thanks for checking the game out, and we do expect to bring it to the XBLIG marketplace very soon with a few more levels and it being more polished.