Vacancy is a puzzle game made for the 2018 game jam at SCAD. It won Best in Show, was debuted at a local gaming convention, went on to win Best in Georgia, debuted at SiegeCon 2018 and was featured in the GDC intel student showcase, winning most innovative that year. It was featured alongside senior projects in the SCAD showcase until I graduated.
Development
We had a team of about 8. Which is very large for a game jam team, but SCAD was a very competitive school and we wanted to create an especially impressive project. Little sleep was had, but by the end of the jam we had a very put-together project. I was the lead programmer and worked in Unity alongside Logan McClure. I think this game was a major success, as puzzle games are no easy task to design and create on a limited budget of time. I ended up creating the movement system, animation controller, dimensional shifting, and puzzle mechanics. The puzzles were mainly designed by me. The dimensional shifting is fairly simple model switching behind a static layer. Most of the work was put into post-processing this effect.
After the initial development time, I went back and polished the game along with Alex Childers, the rest of the team were too busy with other workloads. We added a new puzzle, new animation, and updated the ending cutscene. It was posted on itch.io, and there were a few lets plays.
Intel Competition
When GDC came around, SCAD wanted us to polish up the project again for the Intel student showcase, this was very much a confidence boost for us, as these projects were mostly picked from senior projects made over a year. We then joined up and worked together on the project again. I added new audio support to the game to get a very complex soundscape. We also worked on reworking the game story. We came away with most Innovative that year, which was heavily celebrated by SCAD.
Conclusion
This project represents a very important time in my learning, and helped teach me some very important skills. I look back very fondly on this part of my studies.
