Harald

Harald is a game that I’ve been working on from now and then for over 2 years at this point (2023). I’m currently working on Harald together with my girlfriend as a commission for the LBS Game Awards hosted by my school.

Harald is a horror game set deep in the Swedish woods. You, a normal civilian, find yourself stranded in this strange forest as you suddenly crash your car. What happens if you follow the road is up for you to tell.

Since my girlfriend and I picked up the game again, we’ve been working on improving the game in pretty much all ways. We’ve made new level designs for both outdoor and indoor scenes. The original plan of the game was just to have an interior, but I added an exterior when I worked on the game during 2022, and we’ve kept that idea. We also decided to switch over to Unity’s HD render pipeline, as it will make it easier for us to get the game looking the way we want. It allows for much better control over lighting right out of the box, with dynamic skies and volumetric clouds and fog.

Since I started working on the game in 2020, I’ve become much better at both programming and using the tools provided by Unity. When we started working on it for the LBS Game Awards, I realized how much of the game I would have to rewrite to be able to use it efficiently. Safe to say the code was a mess, and I’ve been working on making it more modular and easier to read.

Other than the technical stuff, I’ve also been working on improving the overall visuals. The trees I made in 2022 have been remade, with a much smaller poly count and a much better-looking result. I watched one of Grant Abbit’s tutorials on how to make low-poly, fairly realistic trees in Blender and took a bit of inspiration from that. The main problem I had before was the leaves, but I found out about leaf planes/leaf plates, which made the whole process much easier with much fewer vertices there as well.

Images

Harald’s old living room, which was the most furnished room in the old prototype. No textures at all.

You can download an old build of the game here and try it yourself if you want to!
Here’s a zipped folder instead of an installer.