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-Overview-

Development Time: Jan 2022 - May 2022

Development Tools: Unity, Audacity

Genre: Interactive Fiction

Team Size: 8

-Game Intent-

Bladebait Bog is both a real-time singleplayer 2.5D fishing game, and a slow-burning cosmic horror experience, in which the player assumes the role of an old fisherman on their trusty dinghy, rowing out into the too-deep waters of a mysterious bog and dredging up horrors and secrets long forgotten or never known to the world. Gameplay is meant to be slow, ponderous, and even calm at times, but gradually undermined by an ever-increasing feeling of dread as the player accrues fragments of information that each fill in a blank in the game’s macabre and esoteric story.

-Design Process-

Development on Bladebait Bog first began with a team of 9 people and a task: create three concepts to pitch that could be built into potential games. With that, our team of 9 split into 4 temporary groups to brainstorm different ideas that we would market to others in the team. In these talks, we as a team jokingly threw around the idea of creating a "Fishing Horror" game that mixed the two genres into one experience. But as we got further into the conceptual phase, one of the temporary groups presented this idea under the title Bladebait Bog.

After deliberating on game feasibility and scope, we ultimately decided to move into pre-production for Bladebait Bog. We first discussed what the game's primary loop and design pillars should be, wherein we created the initial experience of fishing to the depths of an impossibly deep bog to ultimately unravel the mystery surrounding the game's story. The loop was to include an economy system and day / night cyle, wherein the player would sell what they caught in a given day to afford upgrades and ultimately push their progress into the depths further.

As development continued into production, we realized the concept was too scoped for our time frame of five months, so the economy system and day/ night cycle were dropped in favor of focusing on building the horror experience into a classic fishing game style. My personal contributions to this experience would be the creation of the level and sound design.

For the Level Design, I first sketched up a 2D Side and Top-Down perspective of the basic geometry of the bog's depths. I wanted to keep the bog open enough so that terrain would not hinder the player simply by exisitng, rather, I wanted the geometry to supplement the challenge by naturally breaking up the playspace, so that monotony was reduced. I also wanted the terrain to feel both native and foreign to its environment, to add to the mysterious nature of the game. As such, what I concepted was impossibly tall rocks that sank deep into the inky blackness.

For sound design, this was an area of design I had never worked in heavily before. I had knowledge of how to utilize Audacity, and knew how to make ambience sound cohesive, but I had no idea how to create my own music or sound effects. Initially, I had wanted to take time to record my own sound effects utilizing audio equipment, but after some deliberation on the risks that came with such a task, I ultimately ended up pulling from online libraries for SFX. 

Utilizing Audacity, I edited the different sounds I had gathered until I had a library for Bladebait Bog that was implemented into the game, which I then programmed through scripting to play or pause at certain moments to capture the murky, mysterious and dreadful atmosphere of Bladebait Bog. Overall, this project was a fantastic learning experience for me in handling open, non-constrained level design and understanding how to elicit feelings through sound design.

-Documentation-