The Abandoned Farm

About the game

You and your friends set out to explore an abandoned farm. Then your friends vanish. Alone, you have to search the farm for clues, piece together what happened here, and maybe, just maybe, get them back before it's too late.

How to play

The game is story-driven: explore the farm, read everything, and collect the items that will help you rescue your friends. Some items are required to progress, while others are optional but improve your odds. Everything you find feeds into the final confrontation, where your choices and your inventory decide how the night ends.

You have 10 minutes. Take longer and you'll be too late.

Endings

There are three ways it can end:

• You save your friends.
• You lose the fight** at the crop circle.
• You run out of time.

Hints

• Getting started: the first area opens up once you've found two things, your friend's hat and the diary of the farm's previous owner.
• The diary pages: next, track down all four missing diary pages. One of them is behind a locked room, so you'll need to find its key first. Read the dialogue carefully: it points you to several items.
• The final fight: once you have every diary page, head to the crop circle. How it goes depends on what you're carrying:
  • The spell is the only sure way to win.
  • The baseball bat gives you a small chance.
  • An upgraded bat gives you a better one. Add nails first, then a lighter, oil and a rag to set it alight. Even fully upgraded, it only gets you to just over a 60% chance.

What I learned

With this game the goal was to learn dialogue and Unity lighting, from shadows to a flashlight to complete darkness. Dialogue had to do more than show lines. It had to point the player at what to look for next, so writing it meant thinking about when a line appears and what it unlocks. Lighting was the other lesson.