Litany from Beyond (DCJAM24)

This is my contribution to the 2024 edition of the Dungeon Crawler Jam. The chosen topic is "Cosmic Horror" and goes straight forward for a classic lovecroftian story arc. Although story centric, the game tries to follow all rules and restrictions of the contest.

You are an investigator of the unknown. One day, a strange letter reaches you to summon you to an old and abandoned mansion. Strange instructions intrigued you and so you follow the call, facing unspeakable horrors in an inhospitable place.

State of the Game:
As with most jam entries, time went by much to fast and many things were left undone. Please note at this point, that I did this as a solo project due the jam and that of reasons. The game is complete in its main menu and first map, but starting from the mansion, a lot of set dressing is missing, up to the point of simple spheres marking up the blockout of the levels. There is only one functional enemy yet and it does only psychological damage, demonstrating the core mechanic for enemies - gather information and prevent psychological damage with this. Afterwards, you can physically kill it, where the ghoul currently becomes no threat for now only. Yet, you can already loose the game by going insane, if you're in the area of the ghoul.

All lock and key puzzles are in the game and therefor it can be completed already. There was no time left to implement save and load - which aren't necessary during the currently short runtime of minutes - and the options had some issues, so I disabled them.

I most likely will return to this project, as there are still some interesting implementation tasks and dressing the levels is kind of satisfying, but for the jam, it is as it is. The goal was ambitous and oversized from the beginning - yet again, for reasons - and overall, I'm not that disappointed with the result. I ran in two major design issues and had a writers block for the enemy design, but otherwise things went as smooth as I could expect it. Sadly, a lot of real life disturbances eroded the available time for the project more than expected, but on the other hand, it is easter and this is kind of a major thing around here. Got to celebrate, when it occurs.

Used assets:

• Various Synty store model packs
• Steampunk UI
• Music by Andrey Sitkov and Dark Fantasy Studios