The Long Night (Demo)

My Role: Lead Programmer
Time on project: .5 years (winter 2024 – spring 2025)
Average team size: 6 people
Available At: Unreleased
Platform: Windows
Input: Keyboard + Mouse
Engine: Unity 3D

Main Contributions:

  • Game Framework:
    • Developed and implemented our custom turn based combat package.
  • UI:
    • Implemented functionality and graphical elements for combat and the character sheet.

Theme and Gameplay:

You are Petar, a local guide and torchbearer. A Habsburg investigator has hired you to lead him to the village of Malo Svjetlo, where a strange and deadly malady has taken root. As you approach the town, deformed and twisted beasts attack you – an omen of the horrors to come. You find yourself unraveling the origins of the disease, but with each discovery, a rational explanation feels increasingly out of reach.

The Long Night was a demo for a small RPG style game. The player would start in the village hub by the bonfire where they could talk to the different villagers, learning more about the curse and pick-up quests. The player would then embark into one of the nearby outskirts with a chosen companion.

In the outskirts the main mechanic is the darkness. As time progresses the darkness slowly closes in on the player, only being pushed back by the player taking refuge near a major light source. So the player is trying to navigate the outskirts, locating items, lost NPCs and other quest objectives, while trying to keep the darkness at bay. Should the darkness close in completely around the player a combat encounter is triggered.

Combat plays like a traditional turn-based tactics game. Each character has movement- and action points, and these points are used to move around and trigger combat actions, such as attack, heal, push, etc. The Long Night combat had a big emphasis on passive traits and ability effects triggering off of different events; such as a passive trait that heals the player when they move into the darkness, and another effect that might give the player action points whenever they are healed.