We Sleep

Status: Prototype completed
Role: Solo Developer

We Sleep is an action-adventure sidescroller that I prototyped alongside pixelart by Fredrik Nyrell. It’s an homage to John Carpenter’s “They Live” (one of my favorite movies) with the same message of dystopian resistance to a society that’s been infiltrated by alien overlords and their subliminal control.

Foremost I wanted to showcase the amazing pixelart by my collaborator Fredrik, but I also wanted to create a sidescrolling game where the gameplay extends beyond simple arcade principles of platforming or combat. The world was intended to react to player actions, with NPCs becoming suspicious if the player performs aggressive actions, resulting in the alien overlords swarming the player in response.

While the project next evolved beyond the prototyping phase, it was a really great challenge to learn more about Unity’s 2D creation pipeline, as well as how to combine 3D lighting and physics. The game is actually constructed in a 3D space, taking advantage of Unity 4’s broad capabilities, using a custom coded parallax system, projectile physics, and AI behavior.