[POST-RELEASE] The house breathes...

FOREWORD

The year is ending. With it, many other things will be coming to an end in my life. I suppose that, amidst the chaos and grief, it felt right to wish to start something new. Finally deciding to chase a dream I've had since childhood -- to create a game -- felt... Appropriate, in that sense. To mark this year not as an ending, but as a beginning.

I made the decision to dedicate the entirety of November to learning game dev. I've tried before, unsuccessfully, impulsively, that thing where you download an engine and then immediately uninstall it due to finding it too difficult and boring. Twice, three times I did that. I didn't want to give up, not this time, not when I've grown to become such a different person from the one I was in my previous attempts. This time I felt qualified to chase this dream. This time I felt I could catch it.

FOUNDATIONS

Do you still wake up reaching for an empty space?

I didn't know there was a Game Jam that ran every year in November -- a pleasant surprise. I am very into horror, particularly quiet horror. Bonus points if it’s filled with metaphors and conversations about emotional or philosophical topics. So, naturally, when I saw that this year’s theme was ‘secrets’, my mind immediately went towards darker directions.

Back when I decided to join the Jam, I had just finished reading H.P Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward". The initial idea for the game was a carbon copy of the short story: Doctor enters his patient's home, finds an entrance to a secret system of catacombs in his basement, then discovers cosmic horrors in there that the patient kept locked in. I didn't like it. I don't like making copies, it feels... Dishonest, not to the original creator but to art itself. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Also, I have many problems with Lovecraft which I won't go into here, but you can probably guess what they are if you know anything about him as a person.

I pushed this aside as I worked on prototyping, which I will detail below; I thought, at that point, that my game would just be a shorter and simplified version of Charles Ward.

Then one morning I listened to Isobel by Flower Face and my world changed. Neurons flashing. My usual morning daydreams suddenly more vivid and intense as though I had felt the touch of divine inspiration. Scenes flowing like a river, one after the other as a story formed inside my head. 

A house, watching its owner lose himself in his grief. A house, watching its owner succumb to madness. A house, encouraging said madness, feeding off of it like a parasite clinging to one's skin. Rotting like the corpse of the woman he -- Reid -- lost. Warm and pulsing like the heart he wanted to feel beside him. I saw the man sitting in the mattress he called a bed struggling to write his journal as the mold grew in the walls and the smell flooded his lungs. I saw him at a table with rotten organs from a corpse whose grave he violated, trying to evoke ancient spells that didn't actually work. I saw him grow hope then lose it, saw the house play with him as it fed, torture him, relish in his pain, his sorrow. And I saw the house's anger when its prey was stolen from it.

I love living residences. I really enjoyed Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House and I adored Jacob Geller's essay on haunted houses. Suddenly Charles Ward's tale became merely a facet, a false story to cover the truth -- the secret -- of the house; it's alive, it's hungry, and it's angry.

What are cosmic horrors if not metaphors waiting to be written?

STRUCTURE

(I know you)

At first I followed an Escape Room tutorial to prototype the game’s core features (although it is more of a simpler point-and-click than an actual escape room). The only other tutorial was one that taught how to make a typewriter animation for dialog boxes.

The prototyping phase was extremely short. Thankfully, I didn't become too lost in the code and knew, at least in most part, what I was doing and dealing with.

It would have a cutscene in the beginning and in the end, and six rooms inside the house for the player to walk through in a pretty linear fashion. I anticipated about 30 minutes of gameplay, but got far less, to my surprise.

Not a lot to talk about here.

CONSTRUCTION

Do you start to miss your sadness when it goes away?

The actual production of the game started out slow and not very steady. I was busy with commissions and the rush of the approaching deadline hadn't reached me yet. 

The first thing I completed was the starting cutscene, which was originally meant to be just text, but then I figured I'd add drawings to it, because why not. I like how it looks -- I wanted it to feel like you were reading a book about the game's story, kind of like The Haunting of Hill House was turned into a book by a character in the story.

Developing the early game was slower than it should've been, I feel. I took many breaks that now appear unnecessary in retrospect. My intentions and ideas changed over the course of production and I feel they only began to settle once I was done with the living room and moved on to coding the kitchen. It was around here where I began posting devlogs and working more consistently. I would try to draw and code an entire room in a day or two; though sometimes I would feel tired and skip a day between rooms.

The art for this game took me out of my comfort zone several times. For one, I'm not used to drawing interiors, which probably shows. I wanted it to be grayscale both for one of the Jam's wildcards and also because of the odd, empty, slightly nostalgic feeling that gray has as a color. It's not my favorite color, but I don't hate it. I don't hate any of them. The perspective is weird partially on purpose -- I think the house feels more surreal that way. This feeling of something being wrong, yet you can't really point out what it is.

The living room is naturally a communal place, especially in this house's layout as it connects everything together. I wanted each item to reveal something about Reid; not about the situation itself, but about him as a person. I tried to be deliberate about what objects would appear, tried to think about why they were there, wanted to paint a picture of this individual as someone who was troubled, who kept being led to the wrong directions.

The other two rooms in the first floor are both meant to show decay. The kitchen is the house's decay; rotting, dirty, messy, with bugs taking over, forever hungry but with only shreds of food to eat. A physical manifestation of Reid's mentality, seeping into the house via neglect. But in a way it is similar to a rotting corpse, with how an infestation takes over as everything dies, one by one. The bathroom is more of the psychological side of things; our hair falls when we're under stress, and nothing seemed more appropriate to show Reid's mental state than a bathroom covered in hair. But I would look at the hair and realize that the way it spreads and curls is similar to veins -- and so it also became a way to show the house's life, and its growth. Arteries spreading across the walls and floor similarly to tentacles, or plant roots, twisting and turning and eating, consuming, destroying. Is that not how illness works? A thing that spreads and eats? And there's the plumbing, the mirror. The house is alive, and it is playful. It does pulsate how a heart does, but it can hold it, remain silent; it can twist its veins to imitate hands, change its breath to appear more human, concentrate enough to send out whispers between gurgles. It is playful and it likes to make people uncertain of its life, of its existence, of their own sanity. It makes them frail. It likes it when they're frail.

The rush got to me in the last two weeks of the month and I was seriously worried I wasn't gonna be able to finish the game at all. The hallway was neglected -- and I must confess the cockroach being eaten by the strands felt unnecessary after I was done with it. I didn't want it to feel empty, but perhaps I should've. A rotting house likely has a lot of empty places.

The bedroom was weird, I wasn't sure how to draw it, but I like it that way. Distorted, twisted, nonsensical perspective. There is something wrong with the house and that's one way to show it, I think. About the diary -- I wanted to follow the Show Don't Tell rule even though I was dealing with possibly the most explicit way of telling the player what's going on that there is. I don't like giving things away easily. It felt boring when I read other people do it. It feels boring to do it myself. There are a million ways of explaining a situation without using any words that would actually explain it explicitly. I tried my best to do such a thing and I'm honestly satisfied with the result... I could see him in my head, a desperate man struggling to write what he was seeing and hearing and feeling because none of it seemed real, he wasn't sure of anything anymore, he didn't know what to do at all. There is something terrifying about realizing you might be going insane. You wonder if you can ever recover from something like it. But there is something comfortable too, the comfort of giving in, giving up. Of letting whatever is ruining you win, not making any effort, just letting yourself rot and disappear because it's easier, it's easier and probably faster. Isn't it?

The house was happy about him giving in. It certainly was.

The creature in the house -- this is a wrong nomenclature, it IS the house -- has a name. My friend, who made the art for it, also baptized it; "In the Flesh". Paraphrasing him: 

Reid's obsession with his wife's death is associated with the need to have a body, someone else's body, and to preserve it; so the house becomes a body, for it reflects his desire to feel the presence and warmth of another. It bases itself on the human circulatory system, being technically infinite, with its central point being the shape of a heart. 

Here is the full image of it:

He unfortunately does not have any social media, but allowed me to reupload the picture.

FINALIZING

(Come to me, I'll hold you)

I'm still not fully happy with how the basement turned out. It was done in the last days and so I had to rush it... Originally I wanted In the Flesh to jumpscare the player, but my attempts were not satisfying and so I opted for a long, tense cutscene composed almost entirely of sounds as the protagonist attempted to flee while it tried to keep him in the house to feed. I like how it turned out.

The house lives. It waits. Maybe its anger will diminish over the years, but can one truly fix it? Would house renovations act as torture, as a way of mutilating the house's body? Will it be forever haunted?

How silly of me. All houses are haunted.

Isn't that scary? Who else knows us more than the walls that watch us in our lowest moments? What do they do with that knowledge?

I don't know. I can't answer any of those questions. I suppose that's what cosmic horror is all about.

AFTERWORD

When I finished the game, I was happy -- so happy I feld like I could fly if I just put in a little effort. I bought a small cake for myself as a reward and all my friends, these lovely people, celebrated with me in their own ways.

Finishing something as someone with ADHD is like climbing a mountain. Well, maybe not really. We give up halfway through, something which you can't do when climbing, otherwise you'll fall and die. But maybe that's exactly what we do, in a way. It certainly feels like dying when giving up on a project I was passionate about. I didn't die this time.

One friend of mine confessed that I exceeded their expectations. First times are usually bad. First games are usually never finished. First games are usually demos of demos of demos. Incomplete, small, insignificant. I can't begin to tell you how happy I am that I -- apparently -- did not fall under any of those common situations. It wasn't so bad. It's finished. It has a beginning and an end. 

Sounds like a good start.

I intend on restarting my original game dev studies -- revisiting videos, redoing tutorials... I forgot a lot of things about code already and wish to recover these memories. Find out better ways to do the things I did with this game.

I don't know what I'll be making next.  What I do know is that it will be better than this.

I hope you'll be here to watch.

Thanks for passing by. Remember to clean your house and your mind.