About
This was made for the Epic MegaJam 2017 which was a week long games jam and a great opportunity for me to test my Unreal Engine 4 knowledge.
The theme was “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light”. I tried to get the prize for interpreting the theme in the weirdest way, so I set the game in a supermarket where all the light items are out of stock and so you must explore and solve puzzles to supply your own light. I spent well over 100 hours on this project and was very proud of how much I had been able to achieve.
I spent the first few hours coming up with ideas and planning the week ahead, a few days to build the base level, a few more to model and texture everything, finally adding sound effects and then building each variant of the level, finishing up with lots of playtesting and the final submission. The game has five main levels spanning from Monday to Friday, and if you complete the game under a certain time you’ll also get to play a bonus level on Saturday.
The most fun I had with this was coming up with the puns and parodies for all the item packaging and decorative posters placed around the level.
Ultimately I didn’t win any awards, and looking back it’s clear why. A game about finding items in a supermarket wasn’t a very fun concept to begin with, at least not in the way I designed it. Some of the puzzles were interesting but overall they were too cryptic.
There was a streamer who played through all the games from the jam and I tuned in to watch. He really struggled to figure out what to do, though it was fun seeing people in the chat trying to figure out the solutions together.
I didn’t get anyone to playtest the game which was a big mistake, this would have given me a chance to address the main issue of player direction. I had the shopping list and glowing door frames and signs, but these weren’t clear enough. If I could change one thing in this game it would be to fix this.
Progress & Extras
I made short update videos at the end of each day to keep a record of my progress. I’ve also got a world record any% speedrun video which shows off the bonus level.
