Release!

Features

The release of Dead Room features a ton of content. There are:

• 50 total items
• 10 different decorations
• 3 different bosses
• 1 final boss
• 2 playable characters

Now that the game is released, it will be easy to focus on adding more content and more replayability features.

The Process

The idea for this game stemmed from two of my other projects. One of the games, Cabin of Souls, was too bulky in my mind, and could be trimmed into something more compact that allowed for more content and more room for creativity. With Dead Room, I combined both the outside section and inside section into one scene, having the player defend against waves of monsters while defending by boarding up windows. I also wanted to incorporate and expand on the interact system I made for Scribble Survivor, which was a submission to the Global Game Jam 2024. I thought that interacting with multiple things at the same time was key, so I added it in as many places as I could (adding items to the book, boarding up windows, carrying bodies to feed to the cellar). Also, I used the art style and the character design from that game.

At the end of Global Game Jam I knew that I wanted to take these two games and make something unique, so after the jam ended I immediately started working on Dead Room. I knew that I wanted to put an emphasis on art in comparison to Cabin of Souls (which uses a more simplistic character design), and I wanted to start learning 2D animation (which this project helped a lot with). I am very proud of how the character animations turned out, especially the player and zombie animations (if you want to use those animations, I have the character assets available on my page). I also wanted to add a bit more creativity to this game, and along with the different creature interactions, the story, and the unique bosses, items, and decorations, I'm happy with the end result.

In total, it took me almost 4 months to make this game (working as a solo developer), and I'm surprised at how little the game changed during development. In my other experiences, my projects tend to drastically change over the course of their lifetime.

This is some of the first concept art for the game, and you can see that the core concepts stayed the same. Some of the features that didn't make it into the final project were: the south wall got removed (because it clashed with the bird's-eye-view), the timer got removed, and boards don't need to be nailed into windows (originally, the player would have to put nails into the boards before adding them to the windows, and you can see the box of nails under the mounted hammer).

What's Next

If the game performs well, I would like to keep working on it. I would love to add more content to the game in the form of more items, more bosses, maybe some more playable characters, and some new features that spice up the gameplay. I really enjoyed working on this game, and I'm very glad at what the end product turned out to be.