Introduction

Hi there!

It’s Danwiepier from Stork’Studios here. I am one of the artists responsible for 2D assets in Stork’Studios’ games. In this post, I would like to write about our first horror game made during a Slavic game jam that happened at the end of August 2026. The game is available to play on itch.io: Woman Ham Asylum itch.io page.

What was the first idea for the game

We wanted to make something different. The game jam’s theme was “Chill” and we thought it would be a good idea to make something scary, spooky even. An idea came up to my mind. A place. A freezer where the meat is stored. I thought about what could be there that would scare the player. I chose to go with animal gore and blood. When I was younger I used to visit my older relatives on a farm. They showed me how they deal with animals there and it left me with some trauma. Also the animated adaptation of the “Animal Farm” novella was an inspiration too. So then we had a general idea of a butcher who doesn’t like to work with animal meat, but they have to, because the bills are due. We also went with the idea of a female vegan protagonist, because it made sense that she would be put off by animal gore and it would be something that differentiates this game from other titles. Me and Adam brainstormed ideas for gameplay mechanics and we finally started to build the game itself from scratch.

The game

As you open the game you’re welcomed by a menu that sometimes changes to a “scary” menu. As you press play you are shown a short comic-booky cutscene I made in a hurry that gives a little context to the game. The game is a single level with a time limit. We originally planned to make five levels, but it took way more time than we expected to make the whole thing, so we settled on one.

Your job is to process 12 portions of meat as fast as you can. To get one piece you need to get one of the meats highlighted in green and put it on the cutting table. Then, you are automatically dragged into a cutting minigame where you need to time your cuts to shrinking circles on the screen.

Every piece of meat gives you four pieces, so you have to do it 3 times. Next you pick up one of the portions and bring it to one of the meat grinders. After you grind it by doing a circle movement with the mouse, you have to bring the ground meat to the packaging area. You activate the next minigame where you have to draw a square shape to package the meat. Finally, you put the packaged meat on a wooden pallet.

You might think “Is that everything in the game?” and I would say “No”, because as you work in the cold storage you gain hotin points (the name is a wordplay and comes from the literal reverse of “chillout”), which make our character hallucinate pretty creepy things. I was behind the sound design of everything you hear. If you work too long a scary creature will start to chase you. That’s when you need to go back to your office located at your spawn location. There, you can smoke some “kieps”, throw some darts or touch some cactuses. Yeah, cactuses. I guess natural acupuncture is a thing for Ulla - our female protagonist. You do that a couple of times until your stress goes down and anything bloody disapears.

A player can find darts and cigarettes outside of the office. You can smoke outside, but you can’t do things with a cig in your mouth. Talking about work hygiene… You have 13 minutes and 20 seconds to do everything. If the time runs out it’s donzo, the end, the game is over. The hulking creature does not kill you, it just makes you pass out for a couple of minutes. After you process all the meat you get a “you won” screen. Sorry, we really had no idea for an outro cutscene. You can blame me for this.

Behind the scenes

Yeah, no one from our team lives in Warsaw, so thank god this event had a place to sleep. They also had free food for participants. We had sandwiches and pizza. A relative of mine left me cats to take care of at her place nearby, so every 5 hours I had to walk there to feed them. That way I did over 10000 steps on each day of game jam. My legs hurt after the event, but I made a promise and I had to keep it.

We really didn’t have any issues during the event. With our experience we came up with a game idea really fast, like in the first hour of the jam. The idea was clear as day, but we had to put some notions to rest. Our first concept had the player putting finished chunks of meat on a conveyor belt. I had a different look in mind for the monster chasing the player. I thought it would look cool if he looked like an amalgamation of different farm animals dressed like a big farmer man carrying an axe. The cactuses weren’t in our first concept, but we had an unused model and we wanted to use it. I found loud farm animal sounds to use them for our scare factor. Funnily enough, I found so many cow sounds it became a running joke. I added over 30 cow sounds. Yeah, I couldn’t find as many for other animals. We had two programmers, one 3D artist, one level designer and me working on this horror game. We had a little problem figuring out a title for the game. We came up with a title referencing the memes on a reddit sub called r/batmanarkham. Do not go there. I warn you. It’s a crazy place full of crazy people, who really miss Rocksteady Batman (I miss him too. R.I.P Kevin Conroy, you will be remembered). We finished the game before the end of the event, we tested it really well. There was an issue with meat physics in our first playthroughs, but we fixed it. I didn’t expect so many foreigners on this event. Luckily enough I could communicate with them really well. This game jam happens every year, so I’ll be sure to be a participant next time too.

Conclusion

To conclude this event. I think Woman Ham Asylum is one of our greatest projects. I think I did a great job with sound selection. I’m glad this game is playable and beatable while also having a nice horror setting. For our first horror game (not counting bulech) it was a surprisingly good attempt.