Pack of Horrors

It was recently, in 2012, a year wrongly foretold as being the end of all years, that two stupid guys went too far for the sake of success, money and groupies on the Internet. Without money and prospects, both of them, Hynx and Sur0x, were sobbing about their virtual failures while drinking to the (arguably) best drink in the world: Domecq. "Face it, dude, we are never gonna make it." said Sur0x, with blurry eyes staring at his cup filled with the red drink. He let all the air in his lungs out in a single and long sigh. "I wonder how HE made it..." replied Hynx, laid back on the sofa and starring at the ceiling, trying to use his huge belly as a table for his cup. Then he realized he was almost daydreaming, and explained his thoughts a little more: "Pedro Domecq, I mean. We are drinking his Brandy god knows how long after he created it. The guy is immortalized in this drink forever." Just as the idea of being as great as Domecq struck Sur0x's mind, the lights in the room started to flick intensely, the air became a little heavier as if it was a struggle to breath it, and the temperature dropped a few degrees. Startled, they sat straight and looked around, searching for whoever or whatever was doing that, but they saw nothing. Seconds later only a voice was heard in the now dim lighted room. "AND INDEED, IMMORTAL I AM, AND I CAN GRANT YOU BOTH HUGE SUCCESS." soared the voice, as cold as a blizzard. "I'M PEDRO DOMECQ, THE DEMON OF THE WINNERS. SELL YOUR SOUL TO ME AND UNTIL THE END OF YOUR DAYS THE INTERNET SHALL BE YOURS." Then a whole new bottle of Domecq appeared out of the thin air in front of them. But this one was different, and although it could not be seen, someone would feel certainly it was shrouded in a dark purple mist of its own. "IF YOU WANT THIS THAT I OFFER YOU, DRINK THE WHOLE BOTTLE UNTIL THE THIRTEENTH MINUTE OF THE NEXT DAY, AND A WINNER THE TWO OF YOU WILL BE." the voice was slowly fading as it finished the sentence, leaving the decision to both guys. It was ten minutes past eleven, but the guys were so amazed by the thought of winning in life, that they started drinking without a single line of debate. They ended the whole thing just in the nick of time, and when it was over they were too drunk to test their success boost right away. Turns out they actually made a pact with another Domecq, Álvaro Domecq y Díez, the patriarch of the Domecq family, a cursed man who saw seventeen of his sons and daughters die because of his state. And so Hynx and Sur0x were forever doomed to not see fruit in anything that they breed, suffering from constant low viewes in their channel and unfollows in their twitters. Never rush your demoniac pacts because of a deadline, boys and girls, and know this: only losers use Domecq.

And now both of them got a chance in this "Pack of Horrors" gig, interviewing and confabulating online with way more successful people, to see how they are doing in their fabulous speed gaming creation. Is this opportunity just like one of the two Domecq sons that lived, or are they only bringing curse over this joyful and friendly game jam? Discover the dreadful outcome, checking our stream at http://twitch.tv/hynx following the schedule below (GMT -3).

If you are reading this, there's a high chance that you are the kind of person who's into this horror thing and possibly had one or two supernatural experiences, inexplicable stuff that you just felt at one point in your life. Then you might be ready to hear this, let me crack it to you... All cities are haunted, some are more, some are less... but they are as haunted as memorable are their inhabitant ghosts.

Explain why and how they are haunted is our solemn duty. We are a small makeshift team comprised by me (Ivan, producer/product monster) and my wife (Malu, illustrator and surface artist), both stranded in poorly haunted city by the river Spree.

We will proceed to create a model based in a multiple linear regression analysis on ghost behavior and share it with you. The model, a board game, will help you simulate the despair of a ghost trying to not be forgotten, trying to out stand amongst the other entities, struggling to claim the shivers in every spine as their own.

The board game will depict a city, broken down by blocks/districts and you will control a ghost that can manifest itself in several places. While you are doing this, the other players/ghosts will be also impregnating the city with their presence until it all gets too weird for the few who are passing by. Are you the one that will be heard and remembered of in this cacophony of wails? Or is the haunting so intense that will just drive everyone mad?

Kent here! It’s with great pleasure that I announce our participation in this awesome spooky jam! We’re the Lemon team! A group of acid humored people making games because of reasons! Our setup varies from jam to jam. This time, we’re Andre Kent, messing with artsy jibber-jabber and programming. Kauê Lemos, summoning awesome soundtracks from the depths of infinity and Valentine Reina as our general support in pretty much everything from graphics to storytelling and quality assurance!

In this jam we thought of a little stealth point-and-click about kids who need cursed items from a haunted house. The house in Old Avenue, number 82, is a haunted place with legends of spirits that go way back to Salem. Nilo, Ambrosia’s young sister, started having recurring nightmares about the house since her family moved into the neighborhood. Ambrosia assembled a team of daring kids to try and help her little sister get rid of her restless sleep.

Kauê started drafting a bunch of songs for different situations. Ambrosia’s theme is my personal favorite! <3

https://soundcloud.com/7sounds/sets/cradle-of-candles-draft/s-8SG9S

Kent made a bunch of sketches about the idea:

This is the current logo, wich we’re still not quite sure about.

The first character to be developed was Ambrosia, a gothic looking girl with short white hair. As the game mechanics and idea evolved from being a “Hide-and-seek” game with ghosts (requiring me to rethink the characters as being somewhat younger, around 8 ~ 10 years old) I drew a tiny sprite-like concept of what she’d look like. I didn’t feel the game was much attractive as it was, so I made Ambrosia taller again now with long messy hair and around the age of 13 ~ 15. The game idea then evolved into being a treasure-hunt game and I re-used the first concept (the 8 year old one) to make Nilo, Ambrosia’s mute 5 year old little sister. The other characters were to be selectable, each with perks and flaws. They might not get implemented in the jam version though. (If I have the time, I will. Promisse.)

These are some sketches for the game mechanics. The whole game will be played with the mouse (with some alternate keys for the keyboard, of kewrs). The enemies will have line of sight. If you’re spotted, an eye in the HUD will open, so you know you’re being watched. A “Scare’O-Metter” will compose the interface, divided in 4 sections, but I won’t spoil the fun. You have to search every desk, shelf and corner for whatever you’re looking for… but something may be looking for you.

The spirits. They were tricky and annoying to do because I can’t scare myself… mostly because I’m fearless *cough* -not. But because I can’t conceive the actual meaning of “scary”, so I worked with contrasts and unnatural things. Maybe they’ll do the trick… maybe not. (But I friggin hope they do).

Logos. Yeah… well… many names were thought for the game.

And this is the final mockup~

Dear readers, 

  the team known as iko and vini will bring you a story from another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind... a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Story of Emil of Hambleton. 

     Twilight Zone references aside, our game will feature a historical account of the story of Emil, a young boy whose troubled past will be unveiled through interactive storytelling and a photographic report... and it's up to you, the player to find out exactly what happened in this 1930 countryside England village. 

     As far as the story goes... what little we can tell you is: 

  Emil leads a relatively normal life - the people that surround him though, feel like there's something wrong. Years after his sister died, he is now disconnected from his parents, disconnected from friends and other pieces of his childhood, he starts realizing that something is not right. In his subconscious, something is stirring and it's up to you to find out exactly how the strange happenings in Hambleton came to pass. 

  As a last treat, we leave you with a picture of Emil at school, in the year 1923. Notice closely his outfit, specially the number 2, roman, embroidered on his chest by himself. What it means is unknown to us... still. 

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Hello y'all!

We love horror movies and it really haven't occurred to us making anything in the genre before until being taking part in this Jam. After starting playing a bit with the concepts, we though "Man, why we never did this before?" but actually we discovered that a bit later when we created many great game concepts and couldn't decide between them.

After a hard time picking, we end up with the high-school-thriller-on-an-Halloween-nigh scenario we named The Killing Moon. The game follows three protagonists, Ash (Ashley) J. Raimi, Barbara Romero and R.J. MacCarpenter, who are friends during a Halloween party in their high school. Every things feels like just another stupid school party until lights start to fail and weird things happen. Like, really weird shit.

You will play with one protagonist in each game chapter. Each character will add his or her own outlook on the events that takes place in that peculiar night. We choose and isometric perspective to help in the finding and combining hidden objects and the game will flow mostly like and adventure game, such as The Dig, Clock Tower and Machinarium. The ambiance, on the other hand, will be much more on Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Level design is quite non linear and many times you will find and item that can be used to open a complete new path in a past room. Also, some routes are only unlocked by one of the characters and once they are opened, they become available to the forthcoming characters. This is a rough sketch of how maps are growing to be:

We opted by as late 80's and early 90's horror ambiance just because we thought it would be cool. Also, many of our favorites horror movies are of that time, but this only helps explain why it is so cool.

Meet TawStudio’s Bed Time Adventure!

An Top-down Horror Pantshitter Co-op Game!

Helloooo amazing awesome folks!!! Today, we are presenting our new game idea for the Pack of Horrors Game Jam!

This jam is very exciting to us, because we are doing two awesome things at it: an horror game, and learning to develop a top-down action game!

So, let’s go straight to the game: Bed Time Adventure!

The Plot

BTA  tells the story of a group of 5 kids having a sleepover at one of their houses. They find an old book full of terror stories and read it at bed time, as any normal kids would do. But they didn’t know it was Grandpa Otto’s Ancient Sorcery Book! While they are sleeping, the wardrobe door opens violently, and a evilish portal sucks one of the kids to somewhere unkown!

Now, terrified but bravely, the other kids quickly grab a few objets around the room and storm into the portal, in order to rescue the other kid!

Inside the portal, they find themselves on a dark and scary kind of house, a materialization of the kids creepiest fears! It’s a giant house, full of puzzles, mazes, and unkown evil forces they are yet to discover.

  The Mechanics

The game is made for 1 to 4 players singlescreen co-op (maybe a splitscreen/lan/online co-op someday), and is focused on survival and puzzle solving, with some evil creatures fighting involved. The main objective is getting the keys at each floor and advance, until they find and rescue the captured kid!

 Also, they need to survive this deadly place by not letting their fear bar get to a maximum, which “kills them”! If the game is being played by more than 1 player, the others can revive him.

Players will be able to swap between any of the kids, in order to use their unique special abilities, such as strengh gloves, high speed rollers, and even a comfortable fear-reducing branket!

  Look and Feel

Most of the enemies concepts are based on kids worst fears and traumas, as follows:

Some of the house aspects:

And a very little example of what we expect the game to look like =)

Here you can find a alpha-early-pre-trial-prototype of the movimentation mechanics:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/60234831/BedTimeAdventure.swf

And if you wanna hear one of the game tracks with better quality, check here:

soundcloud.com/matt-schiffer/under-your-bed

And thus He, who is the creator, spoketh to Noah: “for this jam, you shall chooseth two of every creature and use them to create games”. And so, two game designers (Helo and Chambers), two artists (Preto and Lumi), two programmers (Picchi and Arthur), two composers (Pati and Celio) and two writers (Fasa and... just kidding, there’s only one) joined forces to bring you this game. Our game is not a horror game. It’s just a point-and-click adventure about spending five lovely days at granny’s house while your parents are very, very far away in a trip.

You will be in the role of little Edgar, a very curious and intelligent boy. And here is your lovely grandmother:

Nothing could go wrong, right?

Hey everyone!  Alpaca Team is a tiny group with a cheerful yellow mascot! We're Midio (the team's artist & mister congeniality), Camis (our programmer & bacon lover), and Noia (our game designer/QA/does-it-all). This time we'll stick with two other friends: Silva (a talented musician) and Trevis (a talented programmer). On to our idea, then! 

Our working title is "The Chainletter Massacre".

This game is a chainletter/ mail "simulator". In it, you control a 30-something old man on the mid 90's who just recently moved to this glass house, and who starts receiving a bunch of bizarre and creepy emails, from undisclosed senders. These emails contain lots of pictures of the supernatural: ghosts, criptozoology, monsters, weird beings and such, and they all need to be sent to a certain number of people, otherwise something really really bad is going to happen to you. Well, guess what? Turns out that they WILL happen if you don't. The thing is, sending emails will make you lose friends and love/health points, but not sending them will make monsters and creepy things happen at night. You'll have to balance properly which emails to send and to whom in order to stay alive. 

We want the player to feel very very insecure with his decisions, and create this sense of disturbance/paranoia. 

This is a quick mockup depicting the art style/palette we chose for this game. It is very close to that of the GB Classic/Pocket, with only 4 colors. We want it to be fairly simple.

Our main (and only) char will be around 30 years old, but we haven't quite chosen his final design nor his name. We liked the one on the top left, but we're still unsure at this time.

We could probably argue for long enough trying to convince you that the main character is actually the house itself. Level design will play an important role in this game, and we want the player to feel constantly insecure. Midio's architectural knowlege will come in handy! This house is also based on a real (and famous) house.

We want to work with the idea of shifts, so you don't really know what will happen until you wind to the night shift and experience what your sent (or unsent) emails will cause.

At night, you can only flee and hide, but things will eventually get harsh.

 We are three Brazilian game developers currently residing in the land of Her Royal Majesty, the Queen, making games and living crazy adventures but always back in time for tea. We are Karen (bitmOO, 2D artist), Rodrigo (amz, coder) and Murillo (titonbrujah, coder). We are all big fans of game jams, and have joined several of them, often with our dream team, Studio MiniBoss, who have now been separated from us by a big fat bad Ocean. We are gathered under the label of The Bovine Perspective, because -edited by bitmOO- cows are cool

Our game is a turn-based strategy-puzzle where you play as the recently hired intern-servant of an evil and dark power, who has entrusted you to keep his castle in working condition while he slumbers for a hundred years.

The game is seen as a cross-section of the castle, which is divided in dozens of rooms (something akin to Sim Tower). Each room, procedurally generated, contains a variety of objects, which have their own properties. Some of them can be picked up (and you can carry only two at a time), and enable you to perform certain special actions (e.g. use a pipe wrench to fix plumbing or wire cutters to drop a chandelier).

Each turn, you can either move to an adjacent room, or perform an action in your current room. Events that require your attention will happen at random in the castle, forcing you to go around fixing things...

However, the core objective lies in that some intruders have just entered the castle, and are a threat to your master’s slumber. Every certain number of turns, they make their own action, exploring the castle. If they are allowed to reach your master’s chamber, he’ll wake up and you’ll lose the game, and if they reach you, they’ll capture you and you’ll also lose the game.

In order to hinder their progress, you must use the rooms of the castle to your advantage in an attempt to drive them insane. Awaken poltergeists, make pipes leak with blood (or maybe it’s just red ink on the water pipes - end result will be the same), drop chandeliers, make sounds and turn off the lights - certain combinations might be more effective against certain kinds of intruders, if time permits such additional nuances.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrreetings!

We are a newly formed group (specially for this pack), but we’ve actually worked together under other aliases on commercial and jam games, so fear not. Fear our game though.

We are Glauber (a "dismissive t*rd" 2D artist), Philip (a veteran game designer and game exploiter - thus the name) and Priscila (an experienced animator curious about game developing). We actually tried to call Ben, but he's drowned playing Majora's Mask...

Anyway, here's our horror game concept:

FUNNEL OF BLOOD

(we don't have a cool concept art, sorry)

An ill person has had the legs torn apart by an ominous oppressive menacing nemesis, and is crawling for life in a sleazy messed up dark hospital in the middle of the night, among other dying people that beg for their lives as the panicked legless victim robs them of their precious blood to refill it's own dwindling life. As long as the victim's motivation does not fade away, it will keep moving and searching for a way out.

This is what the gameplay should look like. It's a 2D top-down run-for-yourlife-but-beware-the-dead-ends-survival-horror game.

Here’s a shot from a test level, so you can grasp the general idea:

That’s it for now. As we come up with newer, more concrete stuff before the jam, we will have it posted here.

Hello there!

We are MiniBoss and we LOVE game jams.

This time, our team is gonna be me (Amora), Pedro, Iuri, and Nina.

Having ideas for this game was fun but also super hard, as we are used to receiving the theme right before a jam starts. Having too much time to think about it actually made things harder for us! But here it is:

Iseult

This is a game set in a dark, medieval world. You are Iseult, a girl accused of witchery who has just escaped her village and now has to keep herself and her wounded old brother alive.

We are Loud Noises! The best group ever. Resistance is Futile.

They Came from the Dark

The night is about to fall. They are coming for you. What are you gonna do to survive?

In this roguelike game the player has to find and gather resources like first-aid kits or set traps and protection seals, so he can ensure his survivability through the night against all sort of evil creatures, that are gonna scare the shit out of his face.

Hello world!

The Pack of Horrors is a game jam organized by independent developers - and game jam addicts - from Brazil.

It will happen from July 26 to 29 (2013), and the theme is “Horror”.

We’ll use this blog to introduce the participants every week and the games each team plans to make during the jam.

This first edition is still very experimental and closed to a small group of friends so it’s easier to communicate.