Inkwell is my submission to the recent "Spooky surprises" game jam hosted by Riggy2k3 and Philly Game Mechanics on itch! The theme was pretty self explanatory, about scary stuff in the most unexpected places - perhaps I did not really go into that later part. I'd started designing this game based on ideas I already had for a survival horror game in my head, with the recent remake of Silent Hill 2 on my mind, and wanted to explore some of those mechanics in a way I could experiment in RPG Maker with. I'm not sure it's to its full potential, but I'm glad to have tried. As it is now, it is probably a bit on the easy side, and I cut down on ideas I had for more in depth levels, but still thought it worth it to share here with it being my second overall "complete" project and pretty fitting for the spooky season upon is. It can likely kill just under an hour of your time if you're looking for something both a bit silly and spooky to play for Halloween.
You play as Dustin, your average young man living a pretty ordinary life that he's grown bored and weary of, until one day something very far out of the ordinary happens to him...and spoiling that would ruin the spooky surprise, I guess lol. It's a bit unfortunate I can't muster up more of an intriguing pull than that, but I guess it's how I gotta write my stories when I overscope for these game jams so far. Suppose it's a bit of a learning process to figure out better ways of writing or other avenues to explore in such a short time frame. Perhaps I'll just say I took some cues from both the aforementioned SH2 as well as many of the works of Junji Ito, the latter of which also influenced my art direction here. Hoping people will enjoy them but really I'd love to hear any sort of criticism so I can improve my work. Thanks in advance to anyone who spends their time on this!
As far as any content warnings go, I tried to keep it fairly on the tamer side of what I'd consider a PG13 rating. A few rare swear words here and there, alcohol and smoking, some slightly scary imagary? Hard to say, I don't think any of my designs came out looking as scary as I'd initially intended to be honest. I can't imagine too many others would be.
Trailer and screenshots:
trailer and screenshots
I have one longform video here, more of a guide for anyone who might get stuck on something. I feel it's pretty straightforward, but kinda difficult to tell when playtesting your own work. It was recorded before I made some minor spelling and bug fixes but is otherwise pretty much the same release.
Download and credits:
You can find the download file on my itch page for the game here: https://bloodykun.itch.io/project-spooky-jam
Many of the assets are standard RTP for RPG Maker MV. I edited a lot of them using Gimp to apply a greyscale filter to them.
Any of the unique art assets and sprites are made by me using Corel Painter Essentials 7, Gimp, and MS Paint.
The music I used comes from https://freemusicarchive.org/home and all fall under a public domain license, and have been altered and edited with other freely distributed sound effects from https://www.youtube.com/@AudioLibrarySoundEffects ,
having used both Windowshare Filmora as well as Audacity to do so.