The Dappled Forest

The Dappled Forest

I took part in the Global Game Jam 2022 this January, and this is the end result…

We met on the London jam Discord. The theme was “duality”, and we ended up landing on the staple reliable theme of light and shadow. Stealth games favour the shadow, whereas horror games favour the light, I wanted to concentrate more of the equality of them. The Yin and the Yang. Dappled light through tree leaves suggests an ambiguous ratio of light to dark. We never got any alpha texture projections going in the end, but the intent was there.

To turn it into a game I thought a timer (1 minute on the clock) and a points system gaining points over time in either light or shadow (as directed by the objective text) would be the core concept just to get us going. I started off by getting into Pro Builder and hacking out some shapes out. With a directional light above the environment, they would cast perfect silhouettes down below.

Taking those shapes, I extruded them to make volumes which would then become the collider volumes. Duplicating these volumes, we could then make 3 arrays of light volumes, shadow volumes and those original shape masks. If we start with the light volumes hidden, we can randomly iterate over these arrays together toggling them randomly to show and hide chunks of the forest. Sometimes we invert everything to add a layer of complexity to make it less predictable. Timings between each iteration was another variable to play with. A collider on the player with some score iterating logic, with a level score target, and we have ourselves a game loop.

Next up was to get some art in, so I downloaded a forest pack I saw on Kenney’s royalty free assets. Same for the UI (with a Google font). I had some fun and made a campfire, hooked up a frontend and a brief win/lose screen. Some other members of the team made some fitting audio which really brings the forest to life.

Another team member got the royalty free character controller operational along with a health bar system, which adds a level of difficulty to the last level. We baked a nav mesh and got some bugs scuttling around in, to finish it off. The game is available to play for free on itch.io.