Editor's Note:
Channel: Death started as a game jam game for Chicaghoul 2023. The jam began on October 3. For this jam, participants were only asked to create a horror, horror themed, or Halloween related game. Entries "officially selected" by an anonymous peer review process would be showcased at an in-person reception.

I met Ian, a programmer working on indie game dev, through previous local game jam showcase but had never worked with him. I went to college with Mike and we have been long time collaborators.

Ian had floated the premise of doing a game where the controller was a TV remote during a Chicago game industry meetup and I was immediately interested. We still needed to figure out how that concept worked as an actual game idea. The game jam deadline was 11:59PM October 17.

Editor's Note:
This idea turned into one of the cornerstones of the design vision 👇.

Editor's Note:
I was researching TV / VHS distortion artifact effects and somehow came across a sample project that turned on my webcam. This seemed like it could be an easy device that was creepy, engaging for live event audiences, and fit the TV / video themes we were working with. This would eventually turn into one of our channel minigames.

Editor's Note:
During the call, we decided I would work on the main framework for channel changing and the central puzzle, and that it would include a James Bond inspired slow moving impending doom. Ian would tackle getting the IR remote signal read in Unity. Mike would focus on visual design. Then we could collectively switch focus to creating minigames for each channel, with the benefit that they could exist encapsulated from everything else from code, design, and presentation value perspectives, and we could add more of them as time went on.

Editor's Note:
While originally thinking about James Bond villain death traps, the game a shocking scene from A.I. Somnium Files came to mind. This would be easy to animate! This was a big puzzle piece falling into place for one of the defining elements of the game. 👇

Editor's Note:
Here's another key design moment that shaped the ultimate form of the game. 👇

Editor's Note:
I'm sad this Bing / Copilot AI search result (👇) did not save properly. I thought this was going to be a cool way to document things. Maybe it just broke when they changed it from bing to copilot? Anyway, this was me asking for a list of many names that fit in a campy horror film from the 80s / 90s. I ended up redoing this later to get a ton more names when we realized we were going to try to have the game be persistent across a long (~3 hours) event. I spent some time wondering how to handle gender and names in the game. I wanted to consider diversity and representation, but also wanted to generally have names match the physical look of the characters. Ultimately I (using GPT AI) created a large list of masculine, feminine, and unisex names and then marked each model we used as either masculine or feminine and procedurally selected at runtime a name from either the unisex list or the genedered list that matched the setting on the model. This would come into play again later when we added the rescued victim interrogation scene, and the fact that the game wasn't tracking the combinations used became somewhat problematic as the NPC model a player rescued in the "killing floor" scene didn't necessarily exactly match the model used in the interrogation scene (though the names of the victims are maintaned across scenes). Considering the time crunch I lived with this.

Editor's Note:
Here we have the basic framework of the game in place (IR sensor connected to Unity, changing channels, central puzzle with stakes and time limit) and begin switching gears to minigame development.

Editor's Note:
Here we can see the visual design of the "killing floor" scene taking shape. 👇

Editor's Note:
Ah the volume minigame. You can see its genesis here, but it would go on to have a long and arduous road ahead, ultimately getting cut before GDC, as usability was problematic and we did not have time to successfully address it despite some attempts.

Editor's Note:
TODO:

Editor's Note:
The "hallway minigame" was a reference to an idea we had about making something inspired by the Friday the 13th NES game section where the player explored a cabin in a first person view. We never fully realized it for Chicaghoul, but when Mack later joined the team ahead of GDC / Day of the Devs we got it in. It had an interesting trajectory ultimately settling into a "backrooms" inspired concept that became one of the more popular (and personal favorite) minigames. More on this later!