When Night Beckons
A puzzle based horror game based on dutch folklore.
Talk to the town folk at day and explore the crypt at night. But beware, for something ancient stalks the dark, drawn by sound and sight. And when morning comes, it swallows what it finds.
Tweeduuster
2025
Game Development
The client
Tweeduuster, an ambitious project to keep dutch sages and legends alive. Tweeduuster works together with the Saxion XR Lab as well as Saxions Creative Media & Game Technologies with the goal to preserve dutch folklore in the shape of games. While working their own projects TWICKEL and de Non van Singraven they assigned us to find our own folklore and create a game based on that idea
Results
The result is a horror based puzzle game where you need to solve puzzles while avoiding or escaping the dead remains of a world war II soldier, who is haunting a crypt. On top of that, the crypt dissapears at sunrise, giving you the option to find clues about the folklore from the locals during the day.
My contribution
Controlls: A lot of time has been spend on controlls. While walking and looking around has been created by our other engineer, i created functions like peeking, being able to slowly open and close doors or closets and the inventory system.
Gameplay: Aside from player controlls i created the enemy behaviour as well. the enemy has a roam, chase and track state. While roaming, it will walk between points that the designers are able to place. When the enemy sees or hears the player they will place a maker on the current position and movement direction of the player and switch to chase mode. If the enemy loses the player he will attempt to track down the player using these markers.
Tooling: For this project i created three systems that helped ease the workload for both designers and engineers. one of such is the dialogue system, which i later continued as a separate project.
Together with the dialogue system goes a condition flag system. This system allowed designers to set booleans on events rather than in code. This way they could select what dialogues to trigger, spawn or despawn certain objects when switching scenes or even change the full enemy behaviour.
The last tool i created was a tool that allowed designers to set waypoints for the enemy's roaming behaviour. by doing so it ensured the enemy would not roam into the starting room of the player, making it a safe space for the player to learn the controls.
Visuals: Aside from coding i spent a lot of time on visuals. i did most of the post processing, created some details like crates and chains and created some custom post processing effects for when the enemy gets close.
