You’ve arrived for a tour of a famous japanese bamboo forest, however, the tour guide can’t be with you due to quarantine. Follow the notes deeper and deeper into the forest to learn about japanese history and some interesting facts about bamboo. You may even learn more about the yokai, Shuten-dōji during your visit.
https://humphreysmedia.itch.io/the-tourist
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-tourist
‘The Tourist’ was a submission piece by myself and Danny Miles for the Ludum Dare 48 game jam, in which the theme was ‘Deeper and Deeper’. My roles during this project included Game Designer and Technical Artist; creating the bamboo forest, coding the game and designing smaller assets, such as the rocks, bamboo and lanterns. The core programmes I used during this project was Unity 2019 and Blender 2.8. The overall aesthetics was inspired by a BLACKTHORNPROD #3 submission, by the name of ‘Sacrifices’ made by CinemaLeo, as well as ‘Shutter Stroll’ by Jannik Boysen. We also made an additional mood board to help with visual consistency:
https://cinemaleo.itch.io/sacrifices
https://jannikboysen.itch.io/shutterstroll
The first stage of this was making the forest as that would be the main component of the game. The bamboo itself was made from extruded cylinders with two separate materials applied to alternating faces. With previous knowledge of particle effects with the Doughnut Tutorial by Blender Guru, I decided to apply that knowledge to make the forest. Rather than having a random scatter of bamboo across, like the sprinkles on a doughnut, I want the angles of each bamboo shoot to be uniform. In addition to that, I want to forest to grow in certain areas of the plane, I found a forum on Stack Exchange for some guidance:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/6250/how-to-control-hair-particle-position
While creating other assets I had experimented with using some techniques previously learnt in other 3D modelling software, that and installing Blender Add-Ons to optimise the art workflow. After making the bamboo forest, I moved on to smaller assets such as rocks and lanterns, for the rocks I install the preset Rock Generator in Blender, which would allow me to create random rocks. I found that I couldn’t get the rocks to a low poly aesthetic that we liked so I added a UV Sphere and applied the Decimate modifier to heavily reduce the polygons and create stylised rocks. With the lanterns, I added several edge loops and scaled them to look like columned segments and for the rings on the inside it was a torus with an Array modifier applied to it. Finally, with our adaptation of the yokai, Shuten-dōji, I imported a character model from Mixamo and used a technique similar to when I create Big T in 3DS Max for ‘Sad Knight’, a previous Ludum Dare submission- duplicating faces from the base model and extruding those to make clothing.
For the mechanics of the game itself, we wanted to keep to a simple walking simulation so then it wouldn’t take away from the aesthetics, which we mainly wanted the player to pay attention to, with that I added a simple first-person movement script, with the camera attached to the player object. To make the last signpost interactable, and cause the death sequence, I added a script to the last sign stating that when the player got close, it would stop their movement. I fell into some issues as the sign was detecting what was behind it, so I applied this script found on Unity Answers and it managed to solve what direction I wanted the sign to detect.
https://answers.unity.com/questions/293767/get-a-vector3-for-transformbackward.html
As the game was a first-person experience, I wanted to ensure there were no glitches or errors when walking around the scene. Two issues I mainly ran into were that the player would walk over the rocks and into the forest, and the other was that the lights would flash when the player got within a certain distance of them. to fix the player walking over objects and glitching into the forest, I made the box colliders for all the rocks, signs and lanterns much taller than the player. For the lighting, especially within the lanterns, this Unity Answers forum suggested changing the light rendered mode from “Auto” to “Important” and that fixed the lights flashing.
Once the game was submitted for Ludum Dare 48, the reviews and rating started to come in relatively quickly. After evaluating some of the feedback, I had noticed some issues such as the bamboo causing frame rates to drop, this was down to the forest itself being a particle effect with 2000 particles, so if I was to go back to his project I would do what some of the players suggested, which would be joining the meshes together in Blender (before exporting it into Unity) or using Instances of the bamboo in Unity. Another common piece of feedback we received was that the jumpscare of Shuten-dōji was not being activated, this was due to the detection distance on the final sign wasn’t long enough so players were going back to the beginning and rerunning through the game in case they missed it. Those were the two main discussed topics in the comments, however, there were also discussions of the audio being slightly too quiet and one player even managed to glitch into the forest through a gap in the rocks. With all the creative and helpful feedback, I would be confident going back to the game after the voting period is over to have a more developed and polished version of the game.
During the Ludum Dare game jam, we were lucky enough to have players record their experience and upload their videos to YouTube, to the point where I’ve been able to compile a playlist with all of them.
Nichola Humphreys 
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