Silent Key is a 2D Survival Horror Colony Management game developed in Unity. It was made in around three weeks for thatgamecompany x COREBLAZER Game Jam 2025. The goal of the game is to help your people survive a constant onslaught of attacks by giant Ghouls while also communicating with other settlements and helping keep them afloat.
The theme of the game jam was "generosity." Our approach was to create an environment where generosity would be at odds with dire circumstances, making the player gauge their generosity in the face of certain doom. Will the player focus on their own survival, or will they try to help people they can't even see?
The game intertwines a few different systems:
- A day/night cycle consisting of 24-hour days. The player can advance the day hour by hour with the click of a button.
- A task management system that allocates the player's resources to different tasks. Tasks accept ranges of resources, which impact their completion time and their yields. The player can advance task completion progress through interacting with the day/night system.
- A randomly rotating set of giant monsters named Ghouls that strike the player's wall each night. The player must discern the night's ghoul via assigning personnel to uncover clues via the task management system, and then put up the proper defenses for the wall using the same system. Each of the four ghouls is heralded by a unique pair of two out of four possible clues.
- A wall split into three sections. Each segment can have one of three defense types installed to defend against different kinds of attacks using the task management system. Each ghoul attacks one or two segments of the wall using different kinds of attacks. No one segment is limited to a single kind of attack, making discerning the ghoul type a big priority for properly defending your wall. If your wall falls and a ghoul attacks you, it's game over.
- A dialogue system implementing Yarn Spinner to live-translate Morse Code between the player and other settlements. The dialogue allows the player to share information on tonight's ghoul attack with other settlements, as well as establish connections, and ask for assistance. They can also send aid over to the other settlement via the task management system.
This project was a collaboration between four people, Vick Lim, Isabel Wu, Mia Wang, and myself. My biggest contributions included:
- Programming: An extension to Yarn Spinner that takes lines of dialogue written in English and live-translates them from Morse Code.
- Programming: The resources and task management system, applying Unity's ScriptableObjects to parameterize tasks and their yields.
- Programming: A Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) AI system from scratch in order to let the other settlements run themselves as if they were being run by the player.
- Writing: All of the branching dialogue in the game was written by myself. The yarn scripts are over 1000 lines long total.
- Art: The resource and workforce icons were drawn by me following specifications set by Isabel Wu.
You can find the project's Github repository here: https://github.com/m-khadadeh/wall-defense.