Hiding In The Closet
Background
“Hiding In The Closet” was developed over the duration of five months in a team of three people and is by far the biggest and most personal project I worked on til now.
My team mate and I decided that we wanted to create a rather story driven serious game during the semester, since it was important to us to spread some kind of message. We decided on spreading awareness on the topic of coming out and show that teenagers often feel left alone with their struggles.
That’s why “Hiding In The Closet” visualizes the term of “coming out of the closet” by having the player stuck in a huge closet with several different color coded levels and the goal of finding a way out of it. The player thereby experiences the possible different stages of coming out and how one might handle this situation.
Our inspirations were the games “Limbo” and “LittleNightmares”, as they were simple jump and runs but had a great atmosphere and game feel to it. “
About
“Hiding in The Closet” is a 2D sprite based platformer, which displays the story of a young gay girl who is willing to come out. On her journey she is confronted by her inner demons, which makes it harder than expected from her.
Each level has different story elements, which progress through each level and convey the story of the character through old diary pages. Other than that the player has to find little collectable lights, which are needed to approach an inner demon at the end. The demon asks the player different questions according to the story and represents the overthinking and doubts before entering a next stage of coming out.
My Contribution
Since the game turned out to be the biggest and most ambitious project I worked on so far, the development allowed me to expand my knowledge on many different levels. My main focus I set at the beginning of the project was the programming of the game, allthough I also took over the whole engine work over the duration of the development process. For the programming part this meant to be the coding of a 2D character controller, which I tried to improve constantly over the devolpment time, a quiz system for the inner demons at the end of each level, saving and loading with the help of PlayerPrefs for the player settings, collectables and a dialogue system, we did not end up using.
Besides that I worked a lot on implementing different forms of Particle Systems in the game, for example for the player movement, the environment, collectables and menus.. In addition, I dealt with the use of 2D lights and the URP in this project for the first time and added animations to them as well as to the camera, buttons and sprites.
