Studio 1 - Weekly Progress - Week 7 HH

By Harry Hughes

Over the mid semester break I was in two minds about how to wrap up my Folio 1 project. Was it a hugely ambitious idea to make three full games AND a documentary short film about the fictional creator of those games AND create a website where one could play all the games? My supervisor Uyen Nguyen suggested I could realise this project over the entire semester instead, but I was also a bit over it and was ready to move on to something more exciting. When we started back this week though, the final week before we have to hand in our Folio 1 projects, I decided to just finish everything off as best as I could. 

First things first, I padded my Multiple Levels and Mystery House games so that I would feel more comfortable sharing them. I added start menus to both games, and a pause menu to Mystery House and new materials to the elements in Multiple Levels. 

Then, instead of creating a fictional documentary about the gamemaker, I simply created an itch.io site where I knew I could write a few paragraphs explaining the whole story. I called the page "Dr. Hughes' Full Games" and made out that it was run by a former employee of Dr Hughes who helped him make the games. I actually think this is more convincing than actually making a documentary and then linking that doco to the page- too much trouble. Here is the full text: 

These are three games that Dr. Hughes made for his patients.

I worked for Dr. Hughes from 2008-2017. He wanted to hire someone who knew how to work with Unity and could help him build games for some of his patients. These three- Mystery House, Multiple Levels, and Zoe's Waterslide- were each made to be played by one patient only. All three of these patients died by suicide shortly after their first play-throughs.

Mystery House was made for Jeffrey Barnett who was locked in his childhood home by his deranged mother overnight and claimed to have seen several poltergeists.

Multiple Levels was made for Tina Affreity, who saw a dear friend fall to their death from a skyscraper balcony.

Zoe's Waterslide was made for Zoe Jackson who at the age of 10 was trapped for nine hours inside a waterslide that had malfunctioned.

Following Dr. Hughes' arrest in 2019, these games have been living solely on my laptop. I think it is important to share this material with the world, so that future psychologists can know to avoid this sort of disturbing therapy.

While it would have been great to be able to play these games in the browser, I just couldn't figure out how to do this. I exported for WebGL, I compressed that build, then uploaded that zip file to itch.io ... But then when I tried to play it I was just hit with that Unity loading screen. I spent hours trying to fix this, but settled for making them games downloadable from the site, which actually looks pretty neat. 

And so there you have it. It isn't exactly what I set out to do in my Folio Plan, but it's not far off. I've made three playable games and presented them as if they were made by a fictional creator, which was pretty much my core intention. Considering I didn't know the first thing about coding or Unity a few weeks ago, this is deeply exciting.

So check out the site: https://doctorhughes.itch.io/, and in case you don't want to download the games, here are some game play videos:

Multiple Levels FULL: https://vimeo.com/455995032/489985cd71

Mystery House FULL: https://vimeo.com/455997053/e693b1b4d5

Zoe's Waterslide FULL: https://vimeo.com/455999015/9f99a78ecb