Mental Trenches

What's Mental Trenches?

Mental Trenches is a 6-day GameJam project developed by 5 second-year students in VideoGame Design & Development. The GameJam theme was "Order in Chaos". We brainstormed for quite a long time to finally land in this idea where we could implement two types of gameplay; stealth and a top-down shooter, while telling a story and raising awareness on PTSD and shell shocked veterans, which continues being a harsh reality to many soldiers to this day.

The order part was implemented in the hospital, it's calm, it's harmonical, it's ordered. It follows rules and protocols. Then there's the antonym. A battlefield, where people are slaughtered, not healed, where there's no rules, only mayhem and survival.

Something that we wanted to do is make ALL the game content original and self-made, we achieved that except for the music and sounds. We used royalty-free background music, provided by Pixabay.

"I just have to ESCAPE"

Run. Escape from the hospital you're being held in. Watch out though, doctors won't allow you to go out, so you'll need to go out without without anyone noticing.

To add replayability to our game, we made three routes, all containing three flashbacks  of your battlefield experiences and traumas. 

Stealth is really important during this part of the game, If a doctor sees or hears you, after checking you out, they will place you back into your room.

"Follow orders and don't fall behind"

We still wanted to give the main theme another twist introducing a general. Someone to provide an order in all the chaos, some kind of rules to follow, and someone to look up to.

To achieve the "flashback" effect we relied in some transition effects but most importantly in a color palette that we wanted to feel nostalgic, that looked like an old photo or like a past tale.

Playing as a younger version of the main character, just follow your general's orders and survive. As chaotic as the battlefield may be, it's really simple and straight forward. Shoot them and don't get shot. You get hit, you die, you die, you lose.

How do I play mental trenches?

Just download it, unzip it and most importantly, enjoy!

Controls are fairly simple:

• Keyboard and Mouse:
  • Move: WASD Keys
  • Aim: Mouse
  • Shoot: Left Click
  • Dive: Spacebar
  • Stealth walk: L-Shift

• Controller:
  • Move: Left Joystick
  • Aim: Right Joystick
  • Shoot: R2 or RT
  • Dive: Square or X
  • Stealth walk: L2 or LT