Seilti (Screamjam 2024) [Download]

25/10/2024

This game was made with my best friend [Sarah] for the Screamjam 2024. There were no theme and it was a 1 week gamejam. At least, it needed to be horror since it was for Halloween and as Sarah's and I are horror fans, it was perfect for us.

I really wanted to make a game in the trenches and having a horror twist. When I was younger, I played to a lot of indie horror games and one that I remembered and loved was [1916: Der Unbekannte Krieg], a horror game in the trenches with ... a Dinosaur chasing you and I really loved the mood of it, like an old war documentary being recorded, it worked really well. So I had this game in mind for this gamejam and we decided to link this a bit to the actual war in Ukraine. That is why the game start in an open space and then when you open the door, you find yourself in the trenches. The contrast between a normal life and, in a second, being in war.

This time, we had to be quick since it was a 1 week jam and, I finished my studies and learned soooo many things about Game Art so I new how to approach this game. I started by making 3 little sketches to set the mood of the game and to have an idea of the trenches.

While Sarah was helping writting the story and making the design of the monster, I started to work on the environment and made modular assets to make the trenches as a maze so it would be quick but efficient while having something good visually. We opted for a PSX approach, simple, quick but cool visually ! When I finished making the modular trenches assets, I started making some paths with point of interest where there would be important stuff. I also started working on the Office part, it was really fun to make these low res textures on photoshop. Everytime, I made sure that we couldn't see some white bleed on the mesh seams so I extended the main texture pattern on the whole document by making a "Fill -> Content-Aware". I mainly made tileable but also some really simple trimsheets or atlas. My girlfriend also helped us for the Soldiers texturing. As for Sarah, she made the monster mesh and Heads mesh and textures. They both did a great job !

This gamejam was pretty intense as I really wanted to finish the game and not continue it after the jam as I knew I wouldn't because I'm kinda efficient while being under stress or having a deadline. So I did my best to do as much as I could for the game, environment and code. But we made it ! I also had time to add a little halloween easter egg that was really fun to make. Sarah made the texture of the halloween big poster and I made the Jack O Lantern :)

I wanted some snow for this to add on the mood, like a really abandoned battlefield with a grey sky, really cliché right ? So I added a WSNormal on the modular assets with a snow texture (which was just a grass texture that I put in white/blue) and it worked pretty well. The snow would always be projected on the Z axis of the meshes.

Here you'll find most of the asset used for the game. All of these are lowpoly with textures res never more than 254x254. And those 254x254 textures were only tileable, the props were only 64x64.

As for the sound, I took some sounds I found on freesound.org and reworked these or sounds I already had. I also made the music, a really simple one with my guitar.

Seilti didn't had the success Between These Walls had but I'm still pretty happy with the result even tho the end was rushed but for the time we had, I think we did something cool. I'll never be fully satified of everything I make and I think that's just part of being an artist. We have to release our work for good. Sometimes when you keep working on a project, trying to perfect it you might make it worse than what you wanted to do.