Game Overview

Midnight at MACD is a first-person short horror experience where you wake up in the middle of the night in a building named MACD (named and modeled after a real building in Clark University) and are then chased by a ghostly creature. Run for your life around these dark halls, look for your keycard ID, and escape the building to win.

Itch.io link: https://itch.io/jam/2024-harvest-game-jam/rate/2975751

Development

My work on this game consisted of the following:

• Going around the MACD building to take pictures and record environments that would be in the game’s main level.

• Build the playable areas of the level, like the hallways and hangout area.

• Constant playtesting to make sure the scale of the level was as close as possible to the real world’s.

• Keep tabs on GitHub to both upload my progress and update my stuff with other’s progress.

• Also keep tabs on another level designer for this project, who was making the classrooms

• Finally, put all our work together when we were both done.

The Idea

The level plan for this project was to work on accurately recreating a segment of one of our college’s buildings, called MACD, in Unreal Engine 5. The halls of the second floor would be the playable area while the classrooms would be there for set dressing, except for one. Actually putting all the stuff down to recreate the layout of the building was incredibly easy since the real life version provides a very direct action plan to that. However, the real struggle came in scaling it all. My plan when it came to scaling was the same as the layout, follow the real life counterpart. The main reason for this was actually to strengthen the horror aspect of the game. Horror games tend to be tighter and more claustrophobic in their play-spaces compared to other genres. Following the real life version of the building’s scaling would accomplish this while also making the level look better (as it is properly scaled). However, actually hitting the mark I wanted here took a lot of trial and error. Constantly tinkering with objects by scaling them up or down depending on how my eye perceived the photos I took compared to the UE5 version. Even after all my work in this regard, when the classrooms needed to be added, pure realism became an impossibility as they were scaled differently than mine. Eventually we reached the conclusion and, while it could still use more work, the final version is something I’m mostly satisfied with.

The Lesson

Properly scaling a whole level that fits with a version of it that exists in real life is hard! Well, that’s to be expected. But in general, scaling can be an arduous and tedious process if not done effectively, and that’s a problem I found myself dealing with because this was my first ever proper project on UE5 (coming from Unity). Having to do a lot of relearning hampered my progress here, and what it showed me is that I simply need to get better at using the UE5 tools by learning them further and further. So yeah, it’s one of those cases where I have to just quite literally “git gud”. The nitpick for this project’s result is the layout of the building. It’s actually not perfect, which I found out after I looked better at some of the halls of the building after we finished the game jam. I know looking for anything “perfect” on a game jam may be idealistic, but I really did try to get it here and failed. Not by too much at least, but still, a bit frustrating. Live and learn.