Hello and welcome to my video game devlog! I will aim to update this page whenever I do any notable work on my game. I honestly can't guarantee that it will ever be finished (I have a full time job, this is just for fun), but you may find it interesting regardless.

It might be an idea to tell you what the premise of the game is. I want to make a horror puzzle game in the style of Myst. It will be set inside a museum as I think museums have a unique eerie vibe that fits a horror game perfectly. I have the exact same feelings about "Myst-like" games; puzzle games from the 90s-00s with prerendered graphics. They weren't usually intended to be horror games, but oftentimes the vibes were just downright weird. I have a great appreciation for the aesthetics of the genre and think it'll be a fun challenge to recreate it on modern hardware.

I want to go a step further than recreating the visuals of a prerendered puzzle game and make it play like one too. I want to make an experience similar to first-person puzzle games like Myst, in which the player navigates through the world by clicking.

My biggest inspiration for this project is the first person puzzle games of the 90s. Their grainy & dithered pre-rendered backgrounds, low quality looping ambient sounds and FMV cutscenes often lend them an unintentionally eerie vibe. Environments are murky and low resolution, and it can be difficult to make things out. The environments almost feel dream-like and dip into the uncanny valley at times because of their low fidelity. A lot of games featured real actors in their cutscenes. All these elements are reasons why I feel this visual style fits a horror game perfectly.

As a child I had several of the Eyewitness series of educational software by DK Multimedia. I couldn’t articulate the feeling I got from these games back then, and they made a huge impression on me.

Another big inspiration for me is museums. To me, a museum on a quiet day feels like a liminal space, a location between worlds. When you're walking through a museum on a random Tuesday afternoon with nobody else around, it truly feels like you're the only person in the world. The silence is deafening. The room you’re walking into is dimly lit and the exhibits are shrouded in shadow. You feel like if you look away from that taxidermy lion, it will walk off its podium and start stalking you. That is the feeling I want to convey with my game.

I'm going to be producing all of my backgrounds, assets and animations in Blender. It's extremely versatile and already my 3D software of choice. Hopefully sticking to a program I already know will make the workflow as streamlined as possible. With any luck, the vast majority of the production process will be possible without leaving Blender at all.

Before committing to an engine, I intend to test a selection of different game engines to determine which is most suitable. I've narrowed it down to three:

- Adventure Game Studio
- Game Maker Studio
- Unity

From my research I think these three engines are generally considered some of the best for beginners. Adventure Game Studio is definitely the most specialised and I think the most promising. It seems to mainly be designed for side scrolling adventures like Monkey Island, but people have actually made first-person adventures with it before which gives me a lot of hope that it will be a good choice.