Project Status: Complete
Engine: N/A
Languages: Lua
The Nightmare was one of my first major projects that I worked on back in 2015. During my early days of game development, I was a big fan of the game Don’t Starve Together, which was in early access at the time. I was eager to create my own character for the game, and with the help of a friend for the art, The Nightmare was born.
The character had three main abilities:
Shadowy Pet
A pet that would fight and defend the player from enemies.
Night Vision
Allowed the player to see in the dark, as well as areas such as caves.
Loves the Night
Would gain sanity during the night and lose it during the day (The opposite of other characters).
The Rework
In 2021, I decided to rework The Nightmare due to numerous bugs and design flaws that became more apparent to me as I gained further experience as a developer. My main focus for the rework was to balance the character so they didn’t provide an unfair advantage to the player. I felt a large majority of modded characters for the game were often overturned, alleviating a lot of the difficulty and making the game far too easy when playing them. I felt this was the case with my character, so I began on a rework.
With the rework, I wanted to focus more on the character’s shadowy pet, which seemed to be the most popular feature of the character among players. I redesigned them to resolve more around this pet mechanic, and give them the ability to tame multiple pets at once. The idea was to use these pets to fight for you, as your character was rather weak on their own.
