Project Description

Hold It in is a 3D comedy-stealth game. Play as Cedric, who has suffered from chronic flatulence his whole life. Help him navigate his first college party without getting caught farting!

Hold It In is built using Unity, and with royalty-free assets. I submitted this project for Global Game Jam Singapore 2024 back in January 2024, where the theme was "Make me laugh".

Project Goals

I worked on this project with 2 goals in mind:
       - To experience my first ever game jam event.
       - To challenge myself to create a game in a short timeframe.

Challenges faced

Creating a game from scratch by myself was definitely not a breeze. Especially not when I only had 3 days to work on it.

Right off the bat, after the annoucement of the theme, I was stuck for many hours thinking about ideas for the game. To be frank, I did not even begin developing until the next morning. I figured that I should take my time because this was a critically important step. I had to pick an idea that I could easily build off of, and had the potential to be funny. In the end, I was found inspiration from a newsanchor blooper reel on YouTube, where a man was arrested for farting near a policeman. Farting was a great idea because there are many different mechanics to try - attacking, propelling, coloring, and the list goes on. Farts also had the potential to be funny, unless you were on the receiving end of one.

Once I settled on farting and began developing, I was hit with another problem - assets. I'm mainly a programmer, so if I were to create my own 3D models or sounds, that would take a lot of time, which I definitely did not have excess of. Thankfully the internet was full of royalty-free assets I could use. I mainly used assets from the Unity Asset Store, Kenney.nl, and freesound.org.

Afterwards, I realized I had another problem. I did not have much time left for development after ideation and sourcing for assets. Thus, I decided on a single mechanic to focus on - holding in farts to avoid detection. From there, I added prioritised features required for a stealth game to work, such as line of sight detection, proximity detection, camera clipping, fart particles, audio effects and various cutscenes. However, it turns out I underestimated the amount of time I had, so I added physics objects when the player runs over them, just for fun. Try it out with the beer pong cups and boxes!

What I learnt

From this game jam, I learnt that game ideas don't always have to be perfect. In fact, I don't think perfect game ideas even exist. What makes a game great isn't the idea, but what goes into it during development. I realized that this was the same for the game projects that I did in school. We would spend a lot of time coming up with an idea that checked all the boxes, but once we started working on it, we would find that some ideas just wouldn't work very well. That was probably why most of my game projects turned out different from what we set out to create. We would find a feature or mechanic more suited for the game, and switch directions on the fly. And for the most part, our games turned out better than expected!

I am very lucky to be able to pursue game development in Singapore where there are communities organizing non-profit events to encourage folks to create games. Special shoutout to Kueh22 for organizing GJJ SG 2024!

GGJ Singapore 2024 was a great experience and I had a lot of fun during the 3 days of jamming. I was happy to meet many people who had a similar passion for creating games, and it reassured me that the game developement scene in Singapore is very much thriving. I was a solo jammer this year, but I'm looking forward to collaborating with others in future game jams!