NightShifter

One of our most ambitious projects yet, NightShifter is the birthplace of Well Done Games itself. It's here where our team began working in its current constellation and even our company's name and logo springs from a little yellow well in NightShifter.

But what is this game about? Nightshifter is a first-person action adventure game where you quest at day and fight at night. A peaceful village is raided every night by nightmarish demons, peskering the dreams of the innocent inhabitans and robbing them of their sleep.

You have to help these citizens at day to get resources which you can trade in for weapons, armor, potions, etc. You will need them at night to fight of the endless hordes of demons and to get further and further until you discover the reason for all this madness.

The game has a unique artstyle, as it features pixel-art textures on low-poly models and has a cartoony look to it, not blocky like Minecraft.

Development

We developed the current prototype of NightShifter as our final project for our Media Studies course at the University of Bayreuth. We applied our learning from our several years of study and dozens of game jams already behind our back.

The game was made in Unity and we really used the engines features extensively.

As for most of our projects, we used Scrum, and we took the iterative approach to game development to our hearts. That way we could get playable prototypes out pretty quickly and evaluate them early.

One of the best examples is the refinement of the towns' layout over multiple iterations. From a really rough blockout containing only cubes, we went to simple forms and colors, first textures (stolen, obviously), first rough models until we settled on a style and a layout for the town, always adapting the placement of houses and points of interests in the world to what we learned along the way.

From here on out

Checkout some gamplay footage in our gameplay video. It shows the whole content of our prototype.

You can also follow the games development on Twitter, although things got quiet around it to be honest, as we silently moved on to other projects.

But a big dream of us is to someday be able to finish NightShifter and release it to the world, so, if you find what you see interesting and you have money lying around - hit us up! :)