Ferral
Ferral is a digital take on the social deduction board game Werewolf, built solo in 24 hours for the University of Bolton's game jam on the theme "Folklore." It placed as the best individually developed game in the jam.
The Project
I took "Folklore" straight to the board game Werewolf and adapted its hidden-role social deduction loop into something playable in a single local multiplayer session. A village of AI villagers shares the map with four anonymous human players: three hunters carrying three bullets each, and one werewolf hidden among them. The werewolf wins by picking off the hunters; the hunters win by working out who the werewolf is before they run out of bullets or villagers.
Building on What I Had
Local multiplayer boilerplate I was already running on other projects at the time saved me from rebuilding input and player management from scratch, which meant almost the entire 24 hours went into the actual design problem: turning a board game built around a moderator and open conversation into something that works without either. That was the hardest part of the jam: there's no round moderator in a video game, so the tension and secrecy the original board game gets from a group sitting around a table had to come from somewhere else, mostly the anonymity of who's actually a hunter and who's the wolf.
New Tools for the Jam
I used Unity's terrain system and Mixamo animations for the first time on this project, both in service of getting a village worth hiding a werewolf in built quickly. Audio was deliberately left out: with only 24 hours, I decided gameplay was worth more of my time than a soundtrack I wouldn't have had time to do justice.
Post-Jam Reflection
Ferral is the most design-heavy project I'd built up to that point, which was deliberate: design was a gap in my portfolio I wanted to close. It came out well enough to take the jam's top individual spot, and it left me wanting to push further outside my usual Unity/C# comfort zone, which is part of what pointed me toward picking up Unreal Engine and C++ afterward.
A Windows build and the full source are both up on GitHub, grab the build directly if you want to round up three friends and try it.