Get Spooked!

Team Credit: Kenneth Zenquis (Leader and designer), Me (Lead programmer), Anthony Morales (A.I. programmer), Jon Cintron (Designer), and music by Birocratic (https://birocratic.bandcamp.com/).

Get Spooked! is a Top-Down 2D pixel art stylized game where you control a spectacular ghastly figure called Spooky, who has a variety of different abilities in his disposal to combat normal citizens and ghost hunters.

Genre: Top-Down 2D Action-Adventure

Team Size: 4

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Platform: PC

Roles & responsibilities -

Gameplay & Mechanics Design

Coded & designed all of the gameplay aspects, from the basic movements, all the way to the Abilities.
Gave the game much needed "juice" to make it feel better and nicer to play.
Designed a dynamic camera that tracked the player movements with more fluidity.

UI Design

Coded and programmed all of the UI widgets and designs.
Added little touches with animations for certain HUD and menu elements.

Level Design

Decorated the entirety of the level and indoor environments.
Spawled the level with all sorts of hidden collectibles and enemy placements

Animation Design

Programmed and worked on all the animations found throughout the game (sprites and assets are by the other spectacular team members).
Made a custom animation state machine for all the different animations since Paper 2D does not have it's own dedicated animation state machine functions.

Sound Design

Designed from scratch many of the sound effects for the game.

Little insight into the development of Get Spooked!:

Get Spooked! is a final Capstone Project that I did for my Bachelor's Degree. I was initially gonna make a Metroidvania style game, but since the classroom was designated for us to be in a group, I was put in the smallest one. Thankfully this team was filled with some very talented and awesome folks and the Lead Designer/Team Captain of the project Kenneth was very humbling and had really cool ideas, and I like where we were going with the game.

The first thing I wanted to do was make sure the movement felt right, and since the art wasn't ready yet in the first two weeks. I went ahead and got some free assets from an RPG tileset, and went to look for tutorials on how to design tile sets and making Paper2D characters move in a Top-Down view type of way with the 4 directions. The concept was to make it omnidirectional, but since that would've required way more sprite work, we decided to leave it to the 4 base directions for sprites and abilities but kept a bit of the semi 3D movement space for the game.

Afterward, we kept tinkering with the game and making sure the basic aspect was in place. By that point the game was shaping up, I decided to add a lighting system to the Paper2D plugin based off a very nice tutorial I found on youtube. At first, It worked great, but when moving to another version of Unreal, it sadly lost it's the material reference and had to be scraped to make the deadline. Some of the abilities and moves would mess with the lighting quite a bit, so it needed some tinkering as well.

Designing the level and figuring out where to put the enemies was a bit daunting. Map size was an issue from the start, we trimmed it down a bit and took out the gate design we had in mind from the beginning phase. We overall kept where the houses should be, but moved around the hunters and how big the parks should be.

There was gonna be a military base where you would fight off a bunch of hunters at the same time, but that was scraped really early on (I thought it was cool, but oh well).

Sound effects were all made by me, distorting and messing around with stock sound effects and Sfxr (later on messed with Bfxr too). I took a lot of inspiration from SNES and Gameboy Advance era game's sound designs for abilities and menus. Music was a little odd to decide at first since we didn't have anyone in the group who knew how to compose a song. We were gonna put a creative commons music from an archive, but we wanted a more laid back LOFI-feel to the soundtrack. Thankfully I was listening to a bunch of that type of music on Soundcloud at the time and decided to see who would let us use their music for the demo. The first and probably only one who responded was Birocratic, he was very nice and I was able to use his music for the demo. It gave a nice chill laid back feel to the game.

Overall it was a hectic, fun experience, and I hope I get to work with these fine gentlemen on future projects. Hopefully a Sidescroller with some of these mechanics.