Inspiration When brainstorming for Track 1, we kept coming back to one question — what's more of a childhood classic than Home Alone? Almost every kid has watched it and imagined being home alone. We wanted to gamify that fantasy in a way that was actually useful. A lot of kids today are home alone more than ever with a real gap in safety awareness, so we built a game that sneaks in real safety lessons while you're having fun defending Kevin's house.
What it does Three Nights at Kevin's is a survival game where you play as Kevin defending his house across three increasingly difficult nights. It opens with a cinematic intro of Harry and Marv scoping out the house, then drops you into the action. Each night is designed around a real home safety concept — from locking doors and windows to knowing when to call for help.
How we built it We built it in Unity 6 using C# with zero prior Unity experience. Character sprites were hand designed in Pixilart, backgrounds generated with Grok AI. We built a custom dialogue system, full scene management with fade transitions, and collision detection with animated responses from scratch. Claude AI was used as a learning tool to get up to speed fast.
Challenges we ran into Linking all our scenes and components together was the hardest part. UI scaling across screen sizes, merge conflicts on GitHub, and maintaining a consistent pixel art style across all scenes were all bigger challenges than expected. We also had a scary moment where we thought we lost an entire scene to a bad git stash.
Accomplishments that we're proud of We built a fully functioning multi-scene Unity game in 24 hours with zero prior Unity experience. Custom pixel art characters, a cinematic dialogue system, smooth scene transitions, and collision detection — all from scratch. The fact that it actually feels polished is something we're really proud of.
What we learned We learned Unity from scratch in 24 hours. We got comfortable with C#, Unity's component system, and scene management. We got much better at Git collaboration under pressure and learned how to use AI tools effectively as a learning resource rather than just a code generator.
What's next for Three Nights at Kevin's Complete Night 2 and Night 3 with increasing difficulty, a trap crafting system with Home Alone style defenses, safety tip cards after each night reinforcing the educational angle, and mobile support to reach the exact kids we built this for.
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