Escape From Amalga Manor
A downloadable game for Windows
-- Submitted for the week-long 2020 Bit Bridge Halloween Jam --
Team: Rachel Dorrett & Ryan Brolley
You have been trapped in the Amalga Manor.
You must survive the horrors of the night and find a way to escape with your life!
-- CONTENT WARNING --
Contains elements of horror and occasional light flashes
-- Controls --
Controller support (controls in game)
Keyboard controls:
- WASD - Move
- Q - Use Left Hand
- E - Use Right Hand
- Space - Sprint
- N - View Ritual Note
- Quit by using Alt+F4
Note: there is a bug where the game will freeze occasionally on player death. Close the game and restart to continue (Sorry for that!)
Download
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Comments
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I can't even start the game bruh. What do you do with the page thing at the start of the game.
Ah, yeah. You need to hold the space bar or 'sprint' button (the south most button on a gamepad) until the arrow is filled to start the game. We for sure need better feedback there as it is not the most clear in hindsight.
And sorry for the delay on responding! The past week was a bit crazy for us... 😩
If you still end up having trouble moving forward, def let us know!
This is such a cool concept! It's incredibly impressive how much you put together in one week, and it's awesome to see that you've also been working on it since the jam. I couldn't tell on stream how scary it really was, but playing it is really nerve-wracking! The artwork for the environment is beautiful, and I really like the contrast between the protagonist and monster designs. There's also lots of little touches that really enhance it and show how much love went into it, especially with the lighting and the screen effects when you're in danger.
You did such a great job putting this together. It feels like the proof of a really excellent game idea.
Thanks for playing, and for all of the feedback!
We were definitely going for a tense feeling and creepy atmosphere, so it sounds like we hit the mark!
Art, lighting, and atmosphere were for sure a major focus for us, so thanks for the praise :D
Lighting, audio, and presentation are a huge part of good horror, so we knew we needed to focus a lot on those aspects.
For this jam, we wanted to explore how we could capture some of those horror feelings. Some of the player action mechanics likely suffered a little bit because of that focus on the art and atmosphere (jam games, heh) but with more time those could defiditely be massaged.
Thanks again, and we hope to take what we learned here and bring it into our future projects!
Here's your participant's badge for the jam!
It took me awhile, but I beat it! The random ingredients for the summons kept it pretty fresh. I ended up making a base in the library are since that part of the room was relatively well covered and and would bring mats over for the circles. At first I thought the monster being in the same room would kill me immediately, but it is the light that kills me, so there were a couple lucky times where I would be behind something. Sometimes I wish I could fit between some things, like some of those chairs in the fireplace room and sometimes got stuck trying to enter that lower part of the library inner area. Getting stuck on the items was also somewhat of a concern, but usually I could just pick it up then. I like how after you're able to defeat the monster it still tries and bothers you haha. Nice job!
Thanks for playing, and that's awesome that you were able to get through, haha :D
We were glad to be able to build the little algorithm to have a controlled randomization of the ritual recipes and the ingredients that were spawned in the house. Being able to play through more than one time was something that we thought was important for a small game of this type.
And yeah, the environment and the monster mechanics, because they were created simultaneously and building off of each other over the course of the jam, there ended up being some portions of the house that were less prone to monster navigation. Moving forward, we could spend some time making parts of the environment more uniform (both in size/shape and in their distribution in the rooms) to meld better with the gameplay.
The items definitely need a pass on how they feel in the world. At first they were modeled after larger world objects that would make sense to have a kind of heavy feel to them, but then we never got back around to cleaning those up. Spending some time to make them noticeable and have some affordance that they can be picked up, while also making them less of a hassle to move around, could help a bunch.
Thanks!
I could see the rooms staying a bit asymmetrical, it was nice to know "phew I'll be safer in this room" or for example the hallway "oh man I hope the monster is not at the other end of this."
Item clunkiness could potentially be used as a variable, like "ah this item is really important but its unwieldy and ahh the monster is after me" feeling, but yeah!
Ah yeah, those are some nice ideas to play around with! We will have to play around with that a bit when we pick this up again :D
Thanks again!