Hey, so I wanted to give you guys an update on where I am with the game and what’s going on in general.

NOTE

Parts of this post are excerpted from a string of messages, so it may not flow smoothly.

Game Progress#

Spoilers

This section of the post reveals a lot of information that a player of the game shouldn’t know before finishing it. If you’re reading this in the future, play the game before reading this.

This is a screenshot of our Canva whiteboard that I have been adding completed work to (as of September 10th, 2024).

We wanted to mix a mundane service industry job with something exciting and a little scary, so we settled on the game taking place in an old run-down theatre. We decided that an interesting way to incorporate a horror element would be to add ghosts that haunt the movie theatre and have them be the “enemy” in the game (I can go into more detail about this later). We also wanted to give the game a deeper meaning; a ghost-hunting game is fun but not memorable. So we connected a few ideas throughout the game.

1. The game takes place over seven days (Monday-Sunday).
2. There are seven ghosts (one per day).
3. The seven ghosts connect to the seven stages of grief.

We want each ghost to represent a different stage of grief and connect their stage of grief to the player in some form. Our current idea is to connect the grief the player is facing about the passing of their sibling to the grief of the ghosts, but we are still not locked in on this idea.

Evelyn the Lead Artist, has drawn up some character sketches (she will be in charge of most assets in the game). I’m planning to take some of the drawing workload off her shoulders once I feel comfortable drawing the characters in the way I want them to look in the game.

Learning Art#

I have also been trying to learn how to draw (I have been using a lot of reference art by a creator called RachelDrawsThis so I can learn how to draw similarly to her). I would love to recreate a similar visual experience in my game to Rachel’s game, which I have been obsessed with since finding out about her work.

This is something I was working on while trying to understand her technique. These drawings are meant to replicate her work, therefore I’m not claiming them as my own because without a reference to follow for each aspect of the drawing, I would have been infinitely lost. This has been my first experience drawing in my free time as a hobby rather than in school for a class.

I have also spent my time learning anatomy and perspective, which has been frustrating to say the least, but it’s quite rewarding to see the work pay off when you finally nail it. I’m not exactly where I want to be in terms of skill, but I don’t plan to give up, and I do plan to keep working on improving these skills.

(I’m trying my best, art is really hard to do right 😔)

Made with <3 by Mason