David's Day Off

This game was made as a part of the 2023 Indiecade Hidden Heroes Game Jam by 10 Bradley University senior capstone students. It showcases stories from our hero's (David Abzug's) life. In it, the player will fight off enemies in order to save their students from the evil company Evilition.

Full Play Through

Credits

Design

Adam Jensen - Level designer, Gameplay designer

Isaiah Monk - Narrative designer, Gameplay designer

Programming

Jackson Laumann - Enemy Programmer, Mech programmer

Jacob Welch - Player Programmer,  Player Animator

Luke Hensley - World Programmer, Intractable's

Art

Audrey Blair - Artist, Animator

Kevin Saucedo - 3D Modeler

Paige Fitch - Artist, Animator

Scott Chernobrov - UI, Artist

Sound

Jake Weber - SFX & Music

David Abzug - Voice Lines

Hidden Hero Highlights

If you have not played the game, we recommend you do so before reading this section, as it details how various aspects of the game relate to our hidden hero, David Abzug.

• Retro Doom Aesthetic - David lived through the eras of these nostalgic games and we wanted ours to represent that in its entirety.

• Star wars and Diablo references - he is also a huge fan of these genres specifically and will often reference it during our classes

• Tie Dye - David wears tie dye every day. Even if he has a formal event, he will wear a tie dye tie or socks. Throughout the game, there is tie dye, RGB, and other bright visual elements to represent this.

• Mechs - in his time as a game designer, he has been affiliated with almost every mech game made in the last few decades and as such; we gave him his very own mech.

• Club throwing - one of his favorite game mechanics is the throwing axe from God of War. We centered our game around this mechanic as it embodied the phrase "5 minutes of awesome is better than 30 minutes of mediocre). It's simple, yet can have so much use within it.

• Evilition - he worked for the company Volition for many years and we warped it into our antagonist for the game. Volition wasn't bad to him, but we wanted some comically evil aspect of his life that wouldn't be overly serious.

• Zavid Dabzug - The opposite of David as character. His core gimic is "turning invisible" by becoming green. This is a reference to a story from David's years as a game developer. A programmer on one of his teams gave the invisible characters a green material because he didn't have a completed shader for invisibility.

• UI - in the menus you will hear David say "uh" and "well".  These are actual voice lines recorded by him and we wanted it to feel as if he was thinking while interacting with each element.

• Settings sounds - something we as students have consistently not done despite him telling us to is having sounds play after moving settings sliders. While unnecessary for a game jam, we knew we needed to have this feature in.

• Discord - our capstone class has a discord, and each of the characters in this game are representations of people from the class.

• Enemies - David constantly tells us to do the unexpected, and that's exactly what went into our enemy designs. The bug in the game are homages to computer bugs while the mouths are "crunchers" in reference to crunch culture.

• David Abzug - every image of of him in our game is actually based on what he looks like. Funny enough, when he played our game, he was wearing the same tie dye shirt he has on in our cover image.  David also voiced all voice lines of himself with our favorite being "Fuck, I left my mech in Peoria."