A Detailed Postmortem of the Game.

Idea

The October Nights is a submission for Frightfully Funky Game Jam. The theme for the Jam was Thru the Eye. I had a brainstorming session, where I quickly went through ideas. I was finding a doable idea, as I was having only a few days for the game.

The idea made it in was, Our Protagonist dies because of an eye. Later on, the eye concept was expanded upon and was made a devil’s eye. A rough sketch was ready about the devil’s eye-consuming protagonist(Nolan).

Art style

For a Jam (Dev League Season1 Round1) I was suggested to make a few more games with hand-painted art. Hence, this art style was chosen. It took 3 days to draw and paint all the backgrounds as well as characters. The backgrounds were scanned and post-processed to look good, dim and vibrant.

Tools

In the same Jam (Dev League Season1 Round5), I stumbled upon Dialogic, a Dialogue Manager for Godot Engine. So Godot was the engine of choice, and using the power of dialogic game took the shape of a visual novel. The music was added from pixabay.com and some sound effects were made by me and some were used from freesound.org

The Story

I am a fan of lore and narrative story writing. The story was written while I was working on the art. As the event was before Halloween, I dedicated it to Halloween. So automatically the Devil’s Eye transformed into a Pumpkin. There is a secret part in the game if you wait for a few seconds after the end screen. I always like to add secret stuff to the game.

In Development?

Yes, I would like to add a backstory of the devil as a secret part of the game. Due to limited time, I was not able to finish the story. If I win this Jam, I will complete this story and redo the art for a perfect one-time playthrough.