Layers of Madness was a sprint week project done over four days in October of 2014. Our team based the game’s theme around the short story “The Yellow wallpaper,” and focused on themes of insanity, motherhood, and women’s freedoms in the late 19th-early 20th century. 

I was responsible for the vast majority of the programming, and was also involved in the mechanical design for the game, including the mechanic of tearing through wallpaper. Initially, we had considered having the player able to tear through to different layers over wallpaper and enter different worlds, or different areas of levels, however, after assessing time constraints, we were forced to reassess our vision to make it fit within the allotted time. 

During the four days, I developed most of the programming myself, and all from scratch, including the tearing system, conversation system, level transitions, etc. I was also responsible for all implementation of assets – backgrounds, animations, etc. into the game engine, and ensured that everything worked as intended this was no easy task, as the density of different aspects being packed in resulted in numerous issues with rendering and programming, which I worked through and solved. The schedule was very harsh for everyone, and one member and I stayed particularly late the night before it was due in order to crunch and finish the project. Our efforts paid off, and the project earned our team third place in the competition overall. The game was also featured in “Alchemy” the college’s faculty of humanities and social sciences newsletter, thanks to its connection to the aforementioned short story and the narrative focus of its design.  

Later, on our own time, several members of the group and I began reworking the game to improve on it. I rewrote most of the system from scratch, and was more involved with visual design this time around, creating systems to improve the visual appearance and animation of the game. It remains a work in progress, but the improvements to the overall quality and visual presentation of the project are already noticeable.

Here is footage of the new design for the beta of the rebuild in action.