GAME
Releasing my own game has been a big dream of mine for a while. I've been working on the game since I graduated in August 2023.
This is a short summary of the work I've done so far. There might be some spoilers ahead.
The game is a exploration based horror game. The demand for horror games stays high, and I've always loved story based games where you can figure out the story through clues and exploring. That makes me believe this is a good place to start.
The game takes place in an art gallery. Painter Joe Montague has gone missing and is presumably dead. An exhibition with his work has been set up in his honor. But a few visitors have unexplainably gotten hurt while nobody else was around. The player is an investigator and is sent to the gallery when it's closed to figure out what's going on.
During the game the player will notice objects missing from paintings. The player will have to find these objects and bring them back to the painting they belong to. They can also find clues to find out what is going on and to figure out how to stop the creature that's chasing them.
STORY
STORY
The game takes place in an art gallery. Painter Joe Montague has gone missing and is presumably dead. An exhibition with his work has been set up in his honor. But a few visitors have unexplainably gotten hurt while nobody else was around. The player is an investigator and is sent to the gallery when it's closed to figure out what's going on.
During the game the player will notice objects missing from paintings. The player will have to find these objects and bring them back to the painting they belong to. They can also find clues to find out what is going on and to figure out how to stop the creature that's chasing them.
ENVIRONMENT
The art gallery the game takes place in should be modern and realistic, as if it could easily exist in real life. The horror aspect will mostly be visible through atmosphere. Since the biggest part of the story happened outside of the gallery, storytelling will mostly be through the paintings and clues, not as much the spaces itself. The gallery is relatively small scale. This way it fits a good amount of paintings, but not too many to make the gameplay repetitive. It also prevents the player having to walk annoyingly long distances, since the gameplay requires the player to go back and forth quite a bit. I added multiple playable rooms apart from the exhibition rooms, to make exploring a little more interesting.
These are the rooms with everything modeled so far.
CREATURE
For story purposes the creature should look somewhat human-like and look like it's made out of paint for the most part. I went with something that has limbs and a head like a human, but make the limbs and fingers longer to almost give a spider-like idea. I made the creature all black, so it can almost act as a shadow since it mostly sneaks up on the player. It's eyes are big and white, to show lack of emotion and makes it uncomfortable to look at. It's mouth is ripped open into a fake smile.
I envision the creature to move animal like. It jumps and crawls on it's arms and legs. I hope to make the movement seem a bit glitchy, to give it a supernatural and creepy feel. I'm not very experienced in animation, so I'm not quite there yet. But I believe practice makes perfect and will not easily give up on my vision. To limit my time working on the animation, I set it aside for a few days to try out new things with fresh eyes.
CLUES
A bunch of different clues like newspapers, journal entires, police reports and more will be spread throughout the map. The player can collect these clues and figure the story out through them. These are a few of the clues.
PAINTINGS
The paintings in the gallery give a look into the life of the painter, his journey as an artist and the events leading to the current situation in the game. These are a few paintings that shaped the start of the painters career.
