Guide the little monster through monster Isle and unlock its secrets!

The Secrets of Monster Isle was the outcome of the Create With Code Game-Jam so I won’t get into the theoretical aspects of development as it was more to facilitate learning and experiment.  The theme of the Game-Jam was secrets and our team made an extremely simple game which was based around uncovering a secret.  Although the game is short, with minimal controls and direction, I was really happy with the outcome.  Due to the short time frame of development, most of the concepts used in this title were borrowed from other titles I had previously worked on.  Two interesting concepts I learned during this project was experimental 2D lighting and working with isometric tilemaps.

With my limited coding expertise and also being the only group member with any Unity or coding knowledge I decided to keep the game mechanics simple and focus on the artistic look of the game.  The new 2D lighting system in Unity really helped with creating an environment with mood through glows and light shafts.  I had the concept of a dark and whimsical environment with a ghostly presence and I feel this was achieved through this 2D light system. It also accounted for some interesting gameplay attributes.  For instance, while the character is behind an object you can see the 2D light glow.  The glow not only gives a ghostly appearance but it acts as an indicator to the player showing where the character is when covered by a foreground object.

Working with the isometric tilemaps during development was also really rewarding. I had experience with tilemaps so the implementation of these was not difficult. The challenging part was explaining them to my team members who did not have the same development background as I do.  The remote nature of this Game Jam also made explaining concepts much more challenging.  A dedicated Discord server helped the development along as well as art templates and a couple tutorials.  By the end of the first day, the other two team members were creating tileable isometric textures that would make up the amazing background of the game.  I feel this experiment in remote game jamming is especially useful for a very new group like Original Games.  In the long term, having a studio space for Original Games would be ideal but before the games generate enough money to pay for the rent, this dream is out of the question.   In the end, the game turned out awesome and it received a lot of attention then it was posted on the Unity Learn site.