During my studies in the first year at Falmouth, I decided to work on a small psychological horror game with the boxlieter method in mind. I wanted to see if reviews did correlate into sales and then use this data in my research for submitting my business plan.
I wanted to take a very minimalistic approach to it's design as many of the lectures I had watched spoke of small development times to increase the $ per hour made. The whole game took 1 month to make and lasts for around 30 minutes with some playthroughs I have watched taking a little longer for those who wanted to explore more. The game features controller support, accessibility options and Steam achievements including hard coded sub titles.
The game used very little modelling. In it's entire development I made 5 complete models.
A human character A soda can Instant Noodles A computer A wardrobe Everything else you see in the game is made using Unreal Engine's primitive objects such as cones, cylinders, and cubes. They are then just manipulated to make them look different. I used a particle system for the alien entity at the end which I think came out really well. A majority of my focus was spent on sound design due to it being psychological in nature. I wanted the player to feel alone in space, and then bombarded in the surreal sections. Surrealism has always been something I have looked for in games but you don't really see it that much. Voice acting was something else I decided to focus on. My friend Wade did a great job at portraying the protagonist and I played David, the southern US eccentric engineer (badly). Sarah Reeves played the Houston contact who delivered her lines flawlessly.
Whilst the game doesn't feature gameplay hooks and is considered a walking sim of such, it did provide the player with a few key points where they were really taken aback. David dying being the biggest one. Being locked inside a pressure chamber and getting crushed by the pressure and exploding into a pool of blood gets me every time I see it on screen being played. The dream sequence where you speak to your dad has a great colour palette and people were always drawn to this, and the final scene where Andrews gets onboard the alien ship and the player is left wondering if it is real or not. All in all, after 1 month development time, people have responded exceptionally well to it. The game so far has 10 reviews and has made just over £1000 on steam after deductions. I was incredibly proud and impressed with how well this actually performed for a £3.99 game. Suffice to say that the review to sale ratio wasn't quite on par with how the boxlieter method says it is, but for a small simple release like this, I could not have asked for anything better.