Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
Yes

Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
Yeeees Dad

Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes

Tell us about your game!
A mage stranded in a dungeon must find his way out. He has one advantage, if you can call it that, in this world objects only exist and are visible when in the light. ​



I’am a software developer and I have always been interested in building games. I have started many small projects in plain JS, Unity Unreal, etc but never actually finished one. So when I found out that you were hosting a Game Jam it gave me the push to start a new project again.

When I first saw the theme, the first thing I thought about was. What if shadow’s are completely black. You can’t see any objects in them or any enemies. But enemies that are inside the shadow also can’t see you. And when you are inside a shadow you are also completely hidden from the enemies. But the player also can’t see where his character is. I thought that would make an interesting puzzle game. You could design puzzles that require the player to move objects to create shadows, or to turn off lights to create shadows. But when you are inside a shadow you can't see, so you'll have to guess and remember where your character is. You can also use these objects to create shadows around enemies. That way you can still see but the enemy is “blinded”. And you can also hide stuff inside the shadows. Maybe create a level that has a permanent shadow (a pillar or wall) and then hide something in it (treasure, items, etc). The player won’t be able to see it. But later he maybe gets a torch or light and then can search the shadows of earlier levels. You can also hide enemies in the shadows that only appear after a player moves a box to create a shadow somewhere else.

So with this in my head I started creating the game. First with Pixy.js but I quickly found out that that was a little bit too barebones for me, so I switched to unity. That worked great until I was stuck on how to generate the right shadows that I wanted. After a while I switched again to Godot and that turned out to be the perfect option for this project.

I still struggled a lot with the shadows, because then not only needed to work visually but I also needed to know which enemies/players were inside the shadow. I learned a lot about vector math and raycasts, etc.
In the end the system uses 3 lights per light and 2 shadows. 1 shadow on the walls to make them visible, otherwise you were just staring at a floor with black borders around them. The other shadow is generated on the floor tiles and is the shadow that actually hides everything.

Because I had the idea to make levels replayable with new items I wanted to go into the direction of a repeating day thingy. Everythime you died or went back to your room a day progressed. But maybe now you have new items to unlock a new route. All items are also reset, So if you for example find a mine/patch of flowers. You can go back there every day to get new resources to craft with. And create new items.

In the end I only got as far as 3 introductory levels to teach the player about the different enemies and mechanics with the shadows. But I'm very happy with the result. The one major thing I wish I could have finished is the perspective. It is completely topdown, but the assets suggest that you can go behind certain objects. This was originally the case but this caused weird issues with shadows being on top of the object while you were behind it. In the end I just limited it to completely topdown to be able to complete the game.

Controls:
WASD to move around.
Enter to craft when standing near the crafting table
Space to grab and pull items when you have the grabber
Hold E to aim shadow grenades and release E to throw
Ctrl-p will draw debug lines to show all the ray casts (can be a little bit buggy)