The Rounds
It's a quiet night at the Skellaytown (pop. ~3,000) town hall. Most people are gone due to the holiday (in this world Halloween is a national holiday, naturally). You're still here though, and it's your job to make the rounds.
The Rounds is a short horror experience made during a week-long game jam (SCREAM SECRETS JAM 2024). It has no save function and can be readily finished in around 30 minutes tops, though probably much less.
Content warning for general spookiness, jump scare(s)
Controls:
Arrows for movement and menu navigation
Z or Space for confirming and using/examining objects in game, and going through doors.
X or ESC for canceling and pulling up the menu.
This is not built to run on mobile, but should operate in browser as intended.
Comments
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Thank you for giving it a go! I've been doing a lot of pixel art lately and I've been really enjoying working in like 4 color palettes and stuff, I think it's really charming :3
I'm happy the jump scare worked out well too! I'm pretty sure it's the first one I've ever put together, and it's generally been pretty successful , so like, it's pretty pleasing to know the grande finale lands like it's supposed to. It took some finagling since RPG Maker's default chasing capabilities are kinda scuffed out of the box and I don't know if it played well with the pixel movement plugin I was toying with ^^;
I'm fixing to put something together for the main SCREAM JAM later in the month, which will probably take after The Rounds a little since the time limit is similar, but I also hope to do a full horror game at some point too as like an independent release? I dunno, working on spooky stuff is just surprisingly fun, and I'm happy you had a good time tooo :3
of course! it's a perfect little pixel horror game ^ -^
i thought it was a great scare and everything worked really well! i didn't find it jarring or anything of the sort. it's interesting hearing the behind the scenes of games like these.
oooh i'll keep a look out for more of your work!!! i hope the jam goes well (if you end up gettin' something up!) and i'm excited to see what you come up with in future projects :)c
I'd happily natter on about the background stuff; it's honestly one of my favorite parts of game dev and I love collecting like, commentated art books for games and things. But I know I'm pretty prone to rambling, so I won't talk your ears off here XD
I'm very excited for the next jam I'm doing! I've been coming up with a few ideas and I'm not really sure what I'll go with yet...I can't start work on it until it opens in 5 days, but I've been doing some general tech stuff for other projects I'm hoping to use to give all my pixel horror stuff some extra oomph and I'm pretty hype for it :3
i definitely get it!!! i especially love concept art a lot! ahh it's just so cool to see a game be made. oh! and patch notes from games can be neat (and funny) too. you can learn about little things that you'd never think about. seeing how something small can break a whole game! that's so interesting! (although probably frustrating for the dev!!) but yes, i don't want to derail your game comments LOL
i'm excited for you!!! it'll be fun seeing what you come up with ^ -^ i would love to join a jam/make a fun little game one day myself!
No worries about clogging up the game comments, I'm too small-potatoes for that to matter at all and getting to engage on the stuff around game creation is kinda why I publish stuff anyway. Outside of the creativity and personal development and such of course XD
I think it's really cool to see games be made as well, and following the process in the middle of it or post-release as patch notes is pretty interesting! Just curious how nowadays even after a game is "shipped" that doesn't mean it's done being developed and that can be pretty neat :3
My next jam starts tomorrow and has a week-long window to make something, but I'm kind of floundering on getting the concept I'm chewing on to come together? I'm sure it'll sort itself out as I tinker though. Before this year I spent a very very long time just like fussing with small things but never finishing anything, so this was the year I really wanted to push myself to finally publish something? And I have! Which is very exciting! Which like, isn't super relevant, just like, if you want to go for it sometime, you should! You could record a dev diary if you felt so inclined for your channel? I know some folks document their stuff like that. Just have to be careful not to dox yourself if you record your desktop at all and such ^^;
Gave it a friendly Let's Play - I'm gonna assume the prototype ends after dying but I kept trying anyways just incase xD. Gameplay and commentary within.
Thank you for giving it a go! Yeah, there is no other end state. It's a little limited since it had to be made in a week and has some jam jankiness on top of that, but I might try and tidy it up sometime, I started putting some notes down on fixes already...
Anyway anyway, thanks for giving it a looksee! I'll have to checkout the video when I have a moment ^^
Take your time and I hope it's entertaining or useful when you're able to watch :)
Certainly! I've yet to tune into a commentary on one of my projects just due to lack of guts, but I'll try to summon some up and give it a go :3