Overview
Save your friends from certain demise in this retro-style pixel art horror game! A group of friends, bored on a cold and stormy night, decided to hold a seance and see what would happen. In typical horror fashion, this seance goes terribly wrong, and a demon has taken control of one of the friends. It is up to the player to run around the house and blow out every single candle, and end the terrifying reign of a demon that has possessed their best friend.
With programming, game design, art, and writing by me, Blackout is a completely solo project developed in GameMaker Studio. Music was sourced online from FreeSounds.org.
Level Design
My biggest interest with the level design of "Blackout" was to get in the way of the player. I plunged the player into darkness, so that it would be harder for them to make out where they were, but I presented the player with each candle on screen. This made each goal clear, but the path to get to it fuzzy. In one particular corner of the game, players must open two doors to get to the candle, the result of a design difficulty of working at this perspective but also in order to provide the players with some friction. Where players often try to simply walk into the bathroom outright, they instead need to go through the bedroom, forcing them to face time lost.
Giving the player friction in this sort of game increases replay-ability. Although the player feels they can finish the game in one go, the short timer and darkness around the map forces them to fail while their goals (the candles) remain plainly in sight. During playtests I was delighted by players failing and immediately wanting to restart and try again. "Just give me one more chance, I got this."
