Last Passenger - Scream Jam 2025

A couple of weeks ago I made a spooky escape room game in a week!

I was intending to write this post right after the jam, but hayfever got the best of me, so I've been squinting at my PC through red eyes for a while. Unlike my previous jams, this was a (mostly) solo-dev project. Before the jam I felt a strong need to prove my ability to "finish" a jam, as the past couple of times I lead a game jam we weren't able to finish.

Something personal would always come up and stop me from being able to give my all to a game. I know jams are smaller, fun projects, but this didn't stop th guilt building up from those experiences. I felt the need to try to show myself I am capable of completing a jam, and reliable enough to do a jam with.

Studying the genre

Prior to this jam I didn't have much experience with the horror genre. I tried to make up for this by playing some horror games in the lead up to the jam. I didn't have as much time, but I did manage to try:

• Paranormasight - A fantastic mystery visual novel with great character writing
• Fatal Frame: Maiden of blackwater - A great third person PS2 horror game. I didn't get too far into this before the jam
• Alien - I thought this would be more horrory, but it was a pretty fun movie!

To me; a traditional horror game is an interactive experience which relies on hand crafted moments which build up atmosphere. I want to make something that feels impressive in this way. The recent trend of procedurally generated experiences and high-repetition games has left me feeling a desire for hand crafted one-off experiences in spaces which change over the course of the game. This, of course, requires more work for less play-time. As play-time has become a metric for what makes a good game for some gamers it's difficult to justify this decision, but I hope it plays off in the long term!

Other prep I did for the Jam

Because this jam was a solo endeavour I knew that I would need to prepare as much as possible. I set up a personal godot references project, which has a publically accessible git repository here
In this repo you can find some things I made to prepare, and links to any tutorials I followed in the readme. The things that I made sure to lock down before the jam were:

• Skeletal mesh look-at IK in Godot [Sadly didn't make it into the jam :( ]
• UI Animations and Sound Effects [Also sadly didn't make it into the jam :( ]
• Dialog systems
• Mesh and level loading from blender
  • Importing collisions with meshes
  • Importing collision-only assets
  • Importing skeletal meshes with animations
• Faked volumetric lights
• Testing a HTML game without pushing it to itch.io first (This helped heaps!)

Although I didn't use a couple of the things I prepared for the jam, having experience setting them up helped me understand the Godot Engine much more intimitely, and they are helping me get the post-jam update very polished.

Jam Development Timeline

10.10 - Family was visiting, I just worked on a brief outline of the characters:

1. Lappy - The main character
2. Station Master Allan - The AI voice who talks to you over the phone
3. The train's emergency support helpline - Was intended as a tertiary, more human character. But was cut to save precious time!

11.10 - Train "movement" (the world is on a 'carousel' upon which the train sits statically) and main menu -> game -> credits flow was working. And, I was able to give Octostitch a character art reference sheet and some notes to start working on the protagonist's design.

12.10 - Train Modular kit setup + screen post processing shader was implemented. Pause menu and settings were also added in then. The character concept was also done on this day, and I started using a billboard with the concept as a stand-in character, as seen here:

13/10 - The interaction system was added! As well as Lappy blockouts + some interior lighting. I also got my friend to try the game, so I had to get Linux builds working then too. I also made a debug menu that I could easily bring up in case the build didn't work. Everything was fine, but the menu helped a lot later on.

14/10 - My back was really sore! The punishment for getting so much done the day before. I was still able to finalize the character model, I got pretty stuck on figuring out how to make the hands appealing, I think they came out good in the end though.

15/10 - The train has colours now! AND I implemented the fake volumetric light for the train's front light. Lappy received some great textres from Octostitch too. I whipped up a rig for her, and found a great tutorial for IK's (I always need to look it up becuase I don't make characters too often) here's that guide.. The first Allan / Lappy dialogue was also done here! I had a lot of fun playing with dialog mechanics, I hope it's as fun to play. I'm not very confident with writing for games, but people seemed to like what I did for this, so I'll definitely have an easier time getting right into it next time.

15/10 - Lappy has wiggle bones for the ears, clothes and hair. Most tutorials for this are uncomfortable to watch, I might need to make my own tutorial so others don't have this issue... I also started work on the other train carriage.

Editing note: This blog post was written on 03/11, but I didn't edit or post it at the time to focus on study for the JLPT N1 Japanese exam in December. I just wanted to finish it up and have it posted before I write the next Passenger post. Sorry for the scrappy half done post