Demersus Devlog #0 - A new beginning

What is Project Demersus?

Blurb

Demersus is a third-person psychological horror experience that explores the horrific reality of alcohol addiction through environmental storytelling. Navigate the protagonist’s fractured psyche, rendered as a beautifully haunting, hand-crafted clay mindscape.

Context

Project Demersus is the name of my current, main, game development project, that started out at my university with the intent of it being both the final project for a few classes in my Graphics and Data Processing module and an opportunity to show off and represent my university at the ZTGK game dev contest organized by Łódź Tech .

Idea

The original idea I had (and would still love to pursue if I ever got the chance to do so) was an episodic game series of psychological / survival horror experiences based around the idea of overcoming traumas in surreal dream scapes where the horrors of a variety of different psychological wounds get materialized.

Thing is… with an extremely small budget (pretty much just anything I can scrape together), not a lot of time (~4 months) and practically speaking just me to rely on (with some help from my bud) I’ve decided to severely reduce the scope of the project. The plan is to provide about an hour long experience that would be a very well fleshed out proof of concept for the project (those who are meant to - will see the vision).

I want to base the concept around the trauma of addiction, specifically addiction to Alcohol. I’m planning to implement:

• Full beginning and end cutscenes
• Frightening gameplay with intelligent monster AI
• A complex withdrawal system
• An engaging and deep story told through tactful environmental storytelling
• All of it being rendered in a surreal, hauntingly beautiful hand-made clay world

This frightening vision will be brought to life using proprietary techniques like a special pipeline for digitizing real world clay creations, the usage of VR & FBT hardware for a low cost, yet very accurate motion capture solution and, among other things, smart animation tricks to simulate traditional stop motion animation.

What has been done up to this point

At this point, sadly not much besides some brainstorming / planning, gathering basic inspiration, and the conceptualization of the digitization pipeline has been done. This is mostly caused by midterms and the fact that I’m still working the current game dev project called Radiorum, where I’m stuck with an incompetent team where a majority of the work falls on my shoulders rendering me too busy to start work on Demersus. I’m planning to finalize the project before the 10th of January (meaning less than 5 days from today).

Plans for the nearest future

1. Full digitization pipeline test - unfortunately this already proved problematic as my Left Index Knuckles controller (part of my VR setup that will be used for motion capture) has died yesterday. The RMA process may take up to a month and with that being around 25% of the whole dev time, I’m really considering just buying a replacement to get the controller in less than 10 days and just having it as a backup later (just ordered a replacement controller to not have to wait for RMA).

2. Gameplay research - playing certain video games, watching horror movies, dev conferences, doing brainstorming and so on.

3. Engine research - I’ve been working pretty much exclusively with Unity up till this point, but I am considering Unreal.

4. Low cost / high reward gameplay tests - Small gameplay tests to see what is interesting / feels good / would be a good fit.

Keep in mind that this project is in development and every / any thing written in these posts is potentialy subject to change.