Time Out
If you weren’t sold by the screaming babies, perhaps we could entice you with the lovely scenery? Explore your neighborhood as the new kid, looking for lost toys to help your friends at the daycare. Rush to complete everyone’s quests before the day is over and it’s time to go home, and avoid the mysterious boogeymonster that seeks to impede your progress!
Contributions
Project Lead
Lead Design
C# Programming
Quests
Quests were the best way to get the player to move about the world with a sense of purpose. Making them randomly generated helps motivate the player to talk to all the characters and explore as much as possible without forcing a sense of impending doom or urgency. Given that they can only accept one at a time, players are incentivized to keep a mental note of where they see other toys as they collect them.
Dialogue
As my first game with a dialogue system, I really wanted it to feel as natural as possible. The text types out slowly, the player can read through multiple lines, each NPC has their own personality, image, and name, and even the intro and outro of the dialogue box itself has an added shake for emphasis. All characters have a list of random conversations to choose from, with specific ones for quests.
Screaming
The humor of the game comes from the fact that all the children are horridly distraught. They are all screaming all the time, and it shows in both their voice acting and their animations. The hard part was voice acting the screams personally and making sure that it wasn’t overbearing. While admittedly a bit annoying, playtesting was done to see where the healthy middle ground of amusing and irritating was, and I think I managed to find just the right amount.
World
It was a toss-up between the child traveling through their imagination or their environment but ultimately was decided that it would be better to stay grounded in reality. With this, we were able to get very cozy looking locations that work well for being filled with obstacles without looking unnatural. The gameplay focuses on the player wandering about, so it was important to make it feel welcoming.
Details
Despite being a Game Jam game, I wanted there to be a lot of little details the player could enjoy. There are animated characters like the dog running about, the toy chest slowly fills as the player collects more toys, there’s a dialogue timer when caught to prevent the player from using it to teleport, and indicators to show when the player is close enough to talk to other characters. These little details help the game feel more complete despite the small scope.
