Blackwood was my submission to the 2023 Scream Jam, a horror game jam on itch.io with over 500 games. It was a very fun jam, and Blackwood got 6th place overall and was selected as one of the 13 Hosts’ Choice games! It also placed within the top 10 in the Sound Design and Story categories! It’s only about 10 minutes long, so if you’ve got the time, go ahead and check it out on Itch!
I had a great time making my first horror game for this jam, and an even greater time playing other people’s games. Below is a jam devlog detailing my process creating the game and my thoughts on the experience!
A Game in a Poster
Unlike other jams I’ve done, the 2023 Scream Jam didn’t have a required prompt aside from its general horror theme. With no barriers to what I could create, I decided to go for a theme I’d never done before: 1920s Art Deco.
I’m a big fan of Art Deco graphic design, and this would be a good way to make the game immediately visually distinctive. I started by creating a simple city skyline using cube meshes in the foreground and a 2D skyline panorama in the background. This dual-perspective trick gives a nice feeling of depth to the buildings. Of course, the background wouldn’t be complete without those signature Art Deco upturned spotlights (my sincere apologies to any nearby pilots or stargazers):
But oh, you say, the contrast is too low! The colors all blur together! The composition is all off! Well, my friend, there is a line to be drawn between graphic design and game design. I can’t have the background sticking out too much – it’s simply a soft backdrop with some nice ominous colors.
My original plan was for the game to simply make it look like the above picture, all the way through. But then, after creating a simple building, I decided to try and frame the game as a poster, just for an image on the title screen:
…and thus, an art style was born!
While this was originally meant to be a title screen, I soon started walking around within the poster. It was fun seeing the flat image spring to life when animated with 3D movement, so… I kept it for the entire game! (Well, ALMOST the entire game…)
I like the poster framing because it adds to the claustrophobic aspect of the gameplay. As a horror game, this is pretty appropriate (were this an action game, it’d just be annoying, but it works here!).
But I still had some things to sort out. I now had an entire 2/3rds of the screen unused. I needed to find a good way to use this space, and, more importantly, I needed to give the game a story!
100 Years’ Throwback
With an art style originating in the design of the 1920s, it only followed that the entire game should take place 100 years ago, at the height of the era. New York famously exemplified the Art Deco style, so the Big Apple (a nickname popularized in the 1920s!) naturally became the game’s setting.
Well, now we’ve got the history ball rolling. The 1920s were a time of prosperity for the upper class, but also an era with a huge wealth gap between rich and poor. At that, let’s add a robber baron with an evil-sounding name (Mortimer Orion Blackwood?) and make him the enemy. Maybe we’re starting from the bottom, slowly ascending up towards his penthouse apartment in search of the gold he’s been hoarding (a very topical thing for millionaires to do in the 1920s).
With this laid out, I decided that all that extra blank screen space should be used for storytelling. I figured it’d be an interesting idea to put newspaper clippings in the margin, allowing the player to slowly learn more about the game’s story as the plot thickens:
I really liked how this looked. The monotone text made the central poster pop even more, and the poster’s surroundings added to the claustrophobia.
Great! Now I just needed to make the actual game!
So Many Cubes…
This is where things began to take a turn for the worse.
I now had a story laid out, and all I needed to do was make the various office and rooftop environments. Right?
As it turns out, nothing’s changed: level design remains a monotonous, extraordinarily difficult task which demands a LOT of time.
I found myself using many, many cube meshes, slowly laying them out, one after another. Whenever I had laid down a cube mesh, I then needed to create a corresponding collision cube so that the player couldn’t walk through walls. All in all, this general process took around 10 hours, just to make a bunch of office buildings.
My respect for level designers has never been higher!
To be fair, it wasn’t THAT bad. It wasn’t stressful. I listened to music and an audio book while creating the rooms. Some occasional parts were very fun to create, such as the penthouse sequence (play the game to see what I’m talking about!). But, generally speaking, laying out all the levels was an extremely tedious process.
Eventually, I was done. The player was now able to go from the bottom to the top, ascending to a safe of gold in the penthouse apartment. To close things off, I added a final chase scene, a quick 30-second escape sequence featuring quick parkour rooftop-jumping in order to end the game on a high:
Now, there were only a few finishing touches to add…
Ya Like Jazz?
How could we have a jazz-era video game without a jazzy soundtrack?
For the music, I recorded some fancy sax lines. I then interspersed them throughout the game – some play when you pick up a key, others play ominously in the background using spatial audio, and still others play during specific events.
For the closing chase sequence, in the interest of creating true cacophony, I… recorded my jazz band warming up. I know, I know, it’s a next-level strategy. With a drum set crashing along underneath the various warm-up exercises, the chase “song” came together nicely.
Finally… we’re 100 years in the past, and you know what that means! It’s time for the *Public Domain* (applause cheer hooray whoop whoop)! Nothing’s creepier than an old 1920s jazz ballad, so of course I had to go and add After You’ve Gone (Marrion Harris) and When I Leave the World Behind (Henry Burr). Oldies but goodies!
With that, the game was essentially done! Time to submit, and… whoops, I messed up the Linux build. With only a Windows version released, I feel like a traitor to the Linux cause… fellow Linux users, please don’t disown me. Alas, rules are rules, and I didn’t tamper with the builds after the jam was finished and the rating had begun.
Oh! The rating!
My Favorite Games!
This is a devlog for Blackwood, but I’d be remiss not to mention my favorite part of any game jam: playing a bunch of new and exciting games. Here are some of my favorites from the jam:
Occultic Pizza is a visual novel which is simultaneously hilarious and creepy. It’s a quick story about delivering pizza in bizarre situations, and it feels oddly surreal while still being witty and entertaining.
Gallbladder +++ is a game where you play as a surgeon who transplants his consciousness into a nanobot to extract a parasite from a sick patient. It’s got some fantastically grotesque imagery (even the itch.io page is filled with character!), and it’s also got many different endings, including an… evocative conclusion featuring Bruce Willis and Oppenheimer. See for yourself…
Photoshooter is a super-short game with a great unexpected twist and a fantastic art style.
One Shot is unquestionably the game that terrified me the most. You’re trapped in a cabin with limited visibility and a loaded gun, told to “find it before it realizes you only have one bullet.” I’m getting chills just thinking about it. It’s a great idea for a game jam, and I absolutely recommend it for the horror.
Mall might be my favorite from the jam. It’s a quirky and strange game featuring great character designs and animations. The strange off-beat dialogue reminds me of the writings of Shigesato Itoi.
Finally, I need to close the list with Hide Away From Mama for putting a huge darn smile on my face. This is a goofy game where you’ve got to test your alt-tab skills as you play a video game, switching your computer to a word doc whenever your mom peeps into your room. Not scary, but certainly entertaining, relatable, and just an absolutely fun experience.
This is just a quick list of my personal favorites, but I played plenty of other fantastic games! Go check out all the jam’s submissions and revel in the creativity of indie game developers!
But, like, come back when you’re done. I still need to give my…
Final Thoughts!
Having never made many horror games (nor having played many, for that matter), this jam was an interesting experience.
Usually, my favorite part of a game jam is the programming aspect; getting a new prompt, having no idea what to do, suddenly manifesting a ridiculous idea, and desperately hammering a bunch of new code to get it to work.
Horror games, though, are much more atmospheric. Many of them are straight-up not fun, purposefully forcing you into constricting terror-inducing situations. Horror games are much more focused on environments than on programming, highlighting creepy level design and hostile surroundings.
Because of this, I hardly did any programming for this jam (unlike Renegade Robots, where I was doing a lot of trigonometry to get the robot physics to work). As a result, working on Blackwood was a fairly grueling process, as I had essentially created all the main programming at the very beginning and spent the vast majority of the jam slowly fleshing out environments.
This jam has given me immense respect for those who do the art behind different game environments. It’s a slow burn, but it’s certainly rewarding to finally end up with a fully explorable environment.
Based on how tedious it was to create this game, I will probably not be doing another horror jam in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a great time! I’m very happy to have created a horror game in the first place, and this was a fantastic learning experience and a great way to explore an unknown genre.