Crates of Hell

This time I wanted to try a game jam solo, just to see what comes of it. I chose the 72h Ludum Dare 57 with the theme Depths. Brainstorming turns out to be way harder alone, but in the end I made Crates of Hell: it simulates the depths of hell by dooming you to endlessly organise crates while your supervisor talks to you.

Knowing I was alone, I went for a minimalistic 2D style with simple vector sprites made in Figma, a beat from BandLab and free drumkit samples for SFX. Before the jam I prepped a menu scene, scene manager, audio manager and a pixelation post-processing setup. Built with Unity 6 and Rider.

Day one: My original idea was a game about dreams where you solve small puzzles to move between dream worlds. I built top-down pawns you could select and move, plus crates and a hammer to pick up, but soon noticed there was not enough time for that game.

Day two: Still stumped on the theme, I decided to just follow the fun: I made the hammer massive, let it smack crates around and juiced everything up. That pivoted the game towards the Depths of Hell, but it still lacked a game loop.

Day three: Instead of the easy route of swarming enemies, the goal became smacking crates into a delivery zone while a snarky supervisor comments on every delivery. I wrote about 100 lines for him; in game he keeps going (and repeating himself) forever. After all, there is no escape from (organising crates in) hell.

The process was a struggle and some things still bug me (the pixelation effect is not clean enough), but for a first solo jam I’m happy with the result.