Bad Manors
Bad Manors was developed by Expresso Games during my final year at Niagara College (2019).
An asymmetric 2v2 party style game that has a team of teenagers searching a haunted house for treasure, while a team of ghosts tries to stop them by possessing objects in the house to kill them. The game is posed as a game show where the living teenagers are in it for the money, and the dead ghosts are in it to come back to life for another day to live in their mansion together.
I served as a generalist designer on the project. My primary tasks were level design and set dressing. In addition, I helped with mechanic development, balancing, and testing.
The team appeared with the game at GD Launch 2019 at Niagara College, winning the 3rd Year Project Award of Excellence.
The team also appeared with the game at Level Up Toronto 2019, winning First Prize in Mobile and Social Gaming and Second Prize in Game Art.
The team was also invited to represent Niagara College at the Niagara Comic Con 2019, showcasing the game there.
Unfortunately, because the game was designed to be shown at conventions, meaning we wouldn’t have access to the network in a normal manner to run a multi-system multiplayer game, the way networking is set up makes it somewhat difficult to set up and play.
For any souls who are really keen to try, the master build of the game can be found here. To get the game running, you will need two PC’s, four controllers, and a router that isn’t part of a network. Plugging both systems into the router, and configuring the game settings with the correct local IP’s for each machine, you should be able to get it running.
Below is a trailer for the game from sometime near the end of our Beta period. While at this point the set dressing and technical art aren’t quite finished, the level design and mechanics are fully implemented at this stage.
