The Monster’s Not Real, Maggie

The Monster’s Not Real, Maggie is a project that was meant to be submitted to Brackey’s Game Jam 2022.1, but due to some time conflicts, we weren’t able to finish it in time. Like N3-VR, this is a 3D first-person puzzler game. However, unlike N3-VR, our focus has been exclusively on the gameplay loop.

In Monster, you play as Maggie who wakes up one night at her house. She’s all alone and she can hear voices coming from behind the doors. If she stands in the darkness, she feels insanity creeping in; but if she stands under the light of the moon, she feels the monster in her house getting closer.

And that’s the main mechanic of the game. We have an invisible meter that’s on a spectrum from Insanity to Danger. Insanity goes up if the player is standing in the dark and Danger goes up if the player is standing in the light. If either of these metrics reach the maximum, the player dies. The goal of the player is to find the key and leave the house.

The main objective of this game was to create a monster without actually having to model it. We wanted to convey the existence of the monster by using only sound effects. The intended feeling was that the monster could have been around any corner, but it actually did not really exist.

You can find more details about the game’s specifics in the Game Design Document linked below.