Night At The Mill | Liam Peachey

Night At The Mill is a game jam game created for the LevelUp game jam with the theme Nature and Sustainability. In this game the player must travel through the saw mill collecting acorns, growing trees and burning wood to fuel furnaces and provide power to the mill. But beware enemies lurk in the shadows!

This game jam was a week long and I worked as part of the design team designing the game and mechanics and then afterwards as the level designer. I mapped out the level, created a block out and implemented the mechanics I iterated and tested it closely with the programmes to make sure everything ran smoothly.

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When designing Night At The Mill we knew we wanted to make a Horror game, we talked about a few ideas such as sustaining high speed or horror in a forest and we settled on a resource management game in which you must sustain furnaces to power various parts of the map.

The Aim of the game was simple, the player must escape the Mill, to do this they must find acorns and use them to grow trees, these trees can be harvested for wood and used to power furnaces. Each furnace uses a different type of wood, the furnaces open doors to new areas and power on the lights. The player will take damage in the dark but also from enemies, so they must stay in the light, avoid enemies and move through the Mill.

When designing the acorn system we decided that each area would house unique acorns, this meant as players progressed to new areas they would also find the acorns to unlock the next areas. However because the furnaces slowly run out of fuel over time players must make sure they have a good supply of wood not only for the next furnace but the ones before it as well. Otherwise the lights will go out and the player will die before they reach the next area.

The enemies inspired by Dr Who would only follow the player when they were not facing the enemy, utilizing audio to its fullest the tension really ramps up when you can hear them moving behind you as you race through the map.

For the core pillars of this game we settled on Horror, Resource management and Exploration.

Here is the simplified gameplay loop which shows the process for planting and harvesting trees to power the furnaces and progress through the game.

When initially designing the map I had planned to only allow permanent lights in the spawn location. This would allow the players to take their time to learn the mechanics, find the first acorns and fuel the first furnace before venturing into the darkness and meeting the enemies.

However I ended up adding a light zone on the hill to the right because players were struggling to get back to the safe zone after pushing into area 5 without dying. This new light zone game them a safe zone to be able to drop down close to the furnace room but didn't allow them to skip any parts of the level later on once they had got that far.

Likewise I added a ramp coming out of zone 4 that allowed the players an alternate route back round to zone 1, this wasn't always the quicker option but did stop the player from getting caught out by too many enemies at the choke point heading back into zone 3.

Block Out of the spawning area, this is where the players grow the trees and where the first acorn can be found. The furnace building is the closest one to the exit of the area.

Block Out showing a large part of the map, you can see the train here which is zone 1 and also the escape bridge from zone 4 to stop players getting caught out too much at the choke point of zone 3

Block Out showing the backside of the zone 4 escape

Block Out showing the furnace room, zone 1 train and the cables which light up when powered by the furnace and run through to the zone it powers, allowing players to follow them to find their way.