EX-Traterrestrial
EX-Traterrestrial was the winning submission to the 2025 Uniting the Valley AZ Game Cup. Over the course of just two days, my team and I developed the entire game and competed against nine other teams from five universities. The theme for the jam was "Creepy", and we were provided all the art assets and were tasked with building a game around them.
Content Design
The theme for this game jam was “Creepy”. My very first thought when I saw this theme was “what if YOU are the creep”. I brought this idea to my group and our initial concept from this was a game where you play as a creepy stalker in a stealth game and go from streetlamp to streetlamp stalking someone, only you don’t realize you are stalking them at first, this would be revealed at the end.
One of the challenges with the game jam, however, was that we were required to use only the provided assets and make nothing outside of the unity engine. This provided an interesting challenge as a lot of the assets were of the interior of a spooky house. This gave me the idea for a home-invasion stealth game similar to Hello Neighbor, but the player doesn’t know they’re in the wrong until the reveal at the end. From this Ex-Traterrestrial was born. The player takes the role of an obsessive ex boyfriend who doesn’t believe his relationship has ended. He sees his ex-girlfriend walking home with her new boyfriend, but because of his delusional state convinces himself that this is actually an alien that has abducted her and taken over her home. You must sneak around the house avoiding the alien to save your ex-girlfriend, only for your delusions to be shattered at the end when you finally talk to her.
Level Design
Due to the restriction of only using the provided assets we needed to get creative when developing the level. I used the assets in creative ways to represent a house that looked like it was part alien spaceship. The house looked more alien the further into it you got to demonstrate the player character’s delusion increasing the deeper he gets.
Another important decision I made was the placement of the alien. I wanted to show it to the player early while also pointing them in the correct direction for progression. I wanted to avoid tutorials or pop-ups since they break the immersion, and immersion was very important for our game. Instead I wanted to teach the player by giving them one option, to learn the mechanics. That is why I put the alien in the bathroom right by the entrance.
When the player first enters the house the first thing they see is a table they can hide under. Right after this the alien comes out and walks towards the player. The only way for the player not to get caught is to hide under the table. This teaches them the core mechanic right away. Afterwards the alien walks back towards the bathroom, encouraging the player to go the opposite direction towards the end door, which is the way to progress the game. After they find the end door for the first time keys will be spawned from a random list of curated spots. The critical path is as follows: The player enters the house, sees the alien, hides, and the heads in the opposite direction typically. The player then finds the locked door which prompts the player to find some keys. These keys spawn at a random point from a curated list of possibilies. An example is shown below:
