TRAILER
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Overview
Bartholomew.exe is a first person horror game that pits you against the titular character - Bartholomew in a cat and mouse chase gameloop. Be hunted by Barth during the Nightmare State and traverse the maze to scavenge for coins and buy weapon damage upgrades and traps until the DREAM STATE is reached. In the Dream State, you are the DANGER! Chase him and GET HIM with your trusty revolver and end him once and for all.
The development of the project began during beginning of March and it was in over in 31 hours and it was submitted to the Ukie Student Game Jam 2025 in which it won a Technical Achievement Award! After the game jam, me and my team continued further refinement of the project which began at the beginning of May and will still be on going until our highly anticipated release on Steam.
The role in my project was creating the atmosphere so I was working on the lights, post processing effects, fog and more to bring an immersive experience.
In terms of organisation, our team used Discord for communication and Trello for task management and Miro for brainstorming throughout the game jam and after it.
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Source Control: GitHub
Team Size: 5
Development time:
Game jam build: 36 hours
Platform: PC
Year: 2024
Awards:
Read more about our achievement:
University of Staffordshire Article
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
Lights and atmosphere (Dream VS Nightmare)
Horror is a genre where atmosphere is key to intimidate the player even if there is not immediate threat to them, so it was important to the project that we nailed down the proper environment tone that would bring emotional tension to the player and also gameplay ramifications. Also, the theme of the game’s jam was “contrast” so leveraging the environment of the game was a no-brainer for us.
The game switches between Dream state and Nightmare state where the environment, lighting and effects changes depending on the state.
State Switch Manager
So how does it work? The light changes are handled by the state switch manager where whenever a switch between states is detected, events for the hiding and unhiding of components in the world are triggered. References for for the actors in the level are grabbed by using instance editable variables for both dream and nightmare actors.
Nightmare Entered event -> Nightmare actors revealed -> Dream actors hidden
Dream Entered event -> Dream actors revealed -> Nightmare actors hidden
COMPONENTS BREAKDOWN:
GOODSKY (BLUEPRINT ASSET)
DIRECTIONAL LIGHT
EXPONENTIAL HEIGHT FOG
POST PROCESSING
SKY ATMOSPHERE
SKY LIGHT
Good SKY is a free FAB blueprint asset that I utilised for the creation of captivating skybox for the game. The plug-in is brilliant but the high definition materials for the skybox did not fit the PSX aesthetic was implemented for every other part of the game, so one decision I made was to downscale the resolution of the textures for the skybox and achieve the desired PSX aesthetic.
GOODSKY COMPONENT
Original
Downscaled
The height fog is a vital yet simple part to Bartholomew’s atmosphere. The nightmare state utilizes a higher density whilst the dream state has just a slight bump over the value of 0 to still give that subtlety of fog.
