Ernest's Site

Get it on Itch or DigiPen Game Gallery.

The Darkworm is a survival horror game made during my final semester at DigiPen. It was made in a two-person team (me and El Schaefer) using Unity. I was the programmer, El was the designer.

This game came about because I was itching to do work with emergent systems, so I designed a fluid-sim cellular automata system to replicate darkness and light. It ended up as the primary mechanic of the game, beyond running around and throwing flares. The worm itself uses only a basic finite state machine, but it works well enough.

It’s a good time! I’m very happy with the way the darkness system turned out, giving a thick and fluid feeling to the light system. The game is relatively small, but was perfectly scoped for our situation. We ended up with nothing to do by the end of the semester, so I killed time by implementing things like a multithreaded automata system (which doesn’t even bring that much benefit.)

I had a lot of bold ideas early in development, but they were quickly cut for being overscoped. Many of these ideas would wind up being turned into Swarm. I also tried to revisit the cellular automata system in a prototype in Godot, but I struggled to get it to run well at the scale I wanted, so I ran out of motivation. It’d be fun to revisit that someday, though.