About Grangaly Grove

I've always been fascinated with atmosphere in games, from the brutal yet beautiful worlds of Hyper Light Drifter and Katana Zero to the surprisingly relaxing feeling you get while playing the STALKER games. Atmosphere has always captivated me and has been a huge inspiration from my works.

Grangaly Grove started out as a first person shooter but that quickly became stale. I wanted to do something that is unique, and so I ended up making this atmospheric experience where you play as a ranger in charge of reporting suspicious activity in the woods. You go out with your polaroid camera and take pictures of various things. You might even find some people along the way.

This project is still in development so some stuff might be broken or unfinished. But what i have at the moment is more than enough to show off.

Features

Simple yet Nice TitleScreen

Ive always liked simple down to earth title screens.
So i took inspiration from other games such as OuterWilds and Exo One and made this simple title screen with satisfying sounds for the buttons and a nice view of the grove.

NPC's

I made some really versatile NPC's for the game with animations and a dialogue editor and everything.
I made these to creep the player out but also give a feeling of safety to the player.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere is very important in games, so I wanted to get it right in Grangaly Grove.
Here you can see and the player getting scolded by your employer for quiting on the first day of the job.
I wanted to give the place a bit of mysterious vibe so a reflected that in the environment.

Car

I wanted the player to have the freedom of quiting the first day on the job as most horror games don't let you do that.
So here I added the option of getting in the car and driving away.
Yes I did make a whole car controller for a joke ending, but it's pretty cool so im still proud of it.

The Watchtower

This is your watchtower. Your base of operations. From here you can see the whole grove and spot suspicious activity.
This is also where you can see how many suspicious objects remain and when you have completed your daily goal you can go to sleep to enter the next night.
I designed this place to feel safe and de-stress as I think it's important in games to have a place with downtime like the benches in Hollow Knight or the bomb fires in Dark Souls.

Equipment

The player currently has 3 pieces of equipment to work with. The camera, the flashlight and the detector.
The detector beeps when you get close to suspicious objects and continues to beep faster and faster the closer you get.
The flashlight is of course used to see more in the dark woods.

And then there is the camera. The camera is used to capture the suspicious objects in the grove.
The camera has a small green light on the right side of the display which lights up when you have a suspicious object in frame.
This is done because when I let some of my friends play the game they always missed the object and took a photo of something irrelevant.
The camera can also zoom in and out and the green light takes that into account. If the object is too small on screen it turns off and the photo doesn't count towards the paper in the cabin.
When you take a photo with the camera the photo prints out, and you get a nice preview of the captured frame.
You can also tilt and zoom the photo however you like for a good view.

The Suspicious Objects

Every day different suspicious objects pop up around the grove. These come in many forms such as cow skulls, campfires, and skeletons.
After you take a photo of them with your polaroid camera they can do stuff in various ways from putting out a fire to spawning monsters that run at you.
With every capture of a suspicious object the counter in your cabin goes down by 1 and when you have captured every object you can go to sleep.
When you wake up there will be brand new suspicious objects for you to capture.

Try It Out!

Click here for Game Page