As Aslan Game Studio, we have been working on this FPS with Galavalomka Games for about 13 months. Today, we released Graveyard Shift to Steam! Available for PC and Mac. And it fits into the Halloween spirit of October.

Graveyard Shift is a FPS with unique game mechanics and a mise-en-scène that mixes both toonish and horror elements together! Yes, we did it. It’s made with Galavalomka Games.

You are fighting against restless ghosts and liches. They revolt, because too many graves are dug in the graveyard, whose keeper is you. Your purpose is to re-kill the undead! Your only friends are mushrooms, those you use to make mushroom bombs.

Your ammo is elemental mushrooms, there are 5 different elements of mushrooms those you collect from the ground. You create bombs with those elemental mushrooms (2 Fire, 1 Water, for example) using number keys 1 to 5. Your enemies also have elements; enemy’s element and the elements of your mushroom-bomb determine the damage you deal. For example, you deal more damage to a Fire ghost if you prepare a bomb with Water mushrooms.

There are 2 types of enemies: Normal ghosts and liches. Normal ghosts are melee attackers, they use claws. Whereas, liches throw you stones and they are much stronger than normal ghosts.

We have 2 game modes: Waved and Survival. You fight against 10 waves of enemies in the first. Survival lasts as long as you are alive.

STEAM
LUDUM DARE ENTRY

Maybe (a low possibility) you had seen Crystal Skull. It is a Ludum Dare 36 entry and a text horror game. Now I released Interactive Horror Stories for mobile platforms and Windows 8.1/10, it has 4 stories inside, including Crystal Skull.

Crystal Skull is an interactive horror story in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure. You make choices and they bring you to different endings.

You are a king who is loved by his people. You have a serious problem, though. Your only child, Juliana, has an incurable disease and she is dying. You hear about a crystal skull which can cure illnesses and make people have visions. It is brought to your palace from the continent of America, but your man warns you that the skull might be cursed.

Now you have a chance to play it on your mobile device! (Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8.1/10)

I finished Crystal Skull 11 hours before the deadline. Yay!

Crystal Skull is an interactive horror story in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure. You make choices and they bring you to different endings.

You are a king who is loved by his people. You have a serious problem, though. Your only child, Juliana, has an incurable disease and she is dying. You hear about a crystal skull which can cure illnesses and make people have visions. It is brought to your palace from the continent of America, but your man warns you that the skull might be cursed.

There are three different endings.

Development

I used Unity, Visual Studio 2015 (for codes) and Notepad++ (for texts). I had developed an interactive story infrastructure in Unity before. It can read txt files for each pages. As the infrastructure was ready, I had adequate time to focus on the story itself.

I am satisfied with the story and the gruesome endings, but it is not so good as a game. There are only two choices those determine the endings.

We can achieve one of the bad endings now! I assure you that it is a shocking one.

I recently published two horror games (interactive stories, to be exact) for different jams. I hope I can find a good story with the theme that will be announced 8 hours later. If it will be a horror story, I will use my own Choose Your Adventure system that I coded for Unity for the previous games.

In case you wonder those horror games, they are The Doll (for MeatlyJam) and After Funeral (for 4HourJam, but it took me 16 hours!).

My MiniLD entry, Snake Eats Ghosts, has a new version. You can download the post-jam version on Gamejolt. I made some tricks to make the game even more enjoyable. And now I published it on Google Play, too.

You control the Snake, you eat and grow. There are also ghosts you might remember from a classic game, they catch you. But if you eat fruit, you are able to eat ghosts for a short time. You score by eating ghosts.

Yesterday, I saw new MiniLD and decided to participate. My idea is bringing Pac-Man and Snake together.

You control the Snake, you eat fruit and grow. There are also Pac-Man ghosts, they catch you. But if you eat fruit, you are able to eat ghosts for a short time. You score by eating ghosts.

Classic Snake rules apply. You can’t touch the walls or yourself. Also, if you didn’t eat the fruit, touching the ghosts also means death.

Game page

Let me write a post-mortem about my entry, Triangle Head’s Adventure. What went wrong and what went right. Some lessons were learned.

The game

It’s an adventure game in which you have 2 minutes. Your head shifts into a triangle at the fullmoons. You have a date tonight with a girl and it’s a fullmoon! You have to find a way to fix your head before she arrives.

Idea

The first time I saw the theme, I thought of Water Ball Game, the mobile game I am working on. WBG is a game about geometrical shapes. Maybe there would be geometrical shapes in my Ludum Dare game, too, their shape would shift. Then I remembered what Umut Derviş (another indie friend of mine) told me: “You should focus on making adventure games, it’s what you’re good in”. I spent some time thinking of a short adventure game, I quickly came up with THA’s story.

I chose Adventure Game Studio and Paint, because I can use them good.

What went wrong?

I wasn’t sure if I could come up with enough jokes and object interaction ideas in 3 days. So I asked people to help me in Facebook groups about game development. I had drawn the intro’s visuals and prepared the story, I showed them to the people. Many people said that they would help me (including an artist who would draw the game). Not bad, huh?

The bad thing is, only one of them actually helped me.

I spent a long time talking with a designer about the game. He didn’t understand the game. He said he uses Mac and is unable to run Windows games (he said no to Wine, too), so I had to prepare him a video of what I had done by far. After spending a lot of time for him, he asked me how much budget I had! He didn’t know Ludum Dare was about freeware games. The lesson I learned: When you ask for people’s help for your freeware game, don’t forget to state that it is non-commercial.

By the time I reached the only man who helped me, I had already finished the living room (everything was improvised as I was drawing with Paint). I got help with kitchen.

Another thing that went wrong is, the references about my old game, Self, were not understood. The mirror scene has references to Self, but nobody talked about it.

Not finding an artist is also something that went wrong. The game looks crappy, it has been downloaded only about 100 times by far. Even my friends didn’t play the game, because I think they didn’t like what it looked like (I usually make games with proper visual quality).

What went right?

I finished a complete game in 2 days. It was 1 minute long then, it had two rooms (living room and kitchen). I wanted to make the game longer, so I also worked on the 3rd day.

Somehow I didn’t need help for bedroom and bathroom. There aren’t much jokes there, though. The part where protagonist looks at himself at the mirror is like a signature of mine, I used it in several games before. At the third day, I had a game about 3 minutes long.

Musics… I have got some musician friends; one of them, Çağlar, had made the musics for Night Hunt. It is an eerie 8-bit track that’s perfectly suitable for the story of shapeshifting. I also have Talha Kaya’s musics in my playlist (Small Games album, for example). “Rock Horse” and “Happy Sample” fit perfectly into THA.

Only a few people played the game, but the ones who played loved the game. They found the game funny and cute. It’s the most important thing that went right.