Demersus Devlog #12 - Major Tonal Shift, Musical Identity and Trailer Concept

Big Change

One of the most crucial things I wanted Demersus to have was meaning, I wanted it to say something, to tell a story. This motivated my approach to a lot of the game’s design and how we handled certain things.

If you flip through the previous devlogs and compare the vision for the gameplay you’ll clearly see that it differs quite a lot. I spent a chunk of time trying to figure out a way to marry all these mechanics and gameplay elements that me and my bud had initially discussed.

This proved to be very difficult.

Right from the beginning I wanted to have a serious, adult approach to showcasing the turmoil happening in the protagonist’s mind. This requires a very specific approach (that definitely doesn’t include going in guns blazing and other such things).

That’s why the idea evolved and I decided to pivot in to a more of a ‘walking sim’ style of experience with puzzles, meaningful imagery and rich environmental storytelling highlighted by the level design and enriched by mocap animation and voice acting.

With all that however, one thing remained. Initially I put this game in to the ‘horror’ category, I though that there would be much more of a focus on scares, chases and the monster antagonist.

After some time, this turned out to simply not be a good fit, so I’ve decided to officially pivot in to a still dark and serious but more emotionally rich experience where ultimately the struggles of the protagonist and their efforts to fix and overcome them are the main focus and driver. This however isn’t as big of a change as you may think as honestly, because of the aforementioned issue, the ‘horror parts’ simply couldn’t really materialize as I wasn’t sure how they would fit in the overall vision I just haven’t officially called it yet.

Music and Audio Identity

As you might imagine, because this is a two person production licensing SFX but most importantly music is extremely hard so therefore pretty much out of the question. Sadly neither me or my bud are musicians.

This leaves us with a couple of options (one of which being royalty free tracks). This would allow us to be able to freely use the assets (with appropriate attribution of course) without any legal trouble.

One issue with this approach however is that you have to take what you can get and (let’s not kid ourselves) the music is often not that great. However, luckily when searching around I struck musical gold.

I found an artist that produces royalty free tracks that sound really great and feel like a fantastic fit for Demersus. This artist is: Scott Buckley ! I found him via a service called BreakingCopyright .

After looking through his library of tracks I’m pretty confident it can become the main musical identity of the game.

Trailer Concept

I’m aware that it might be a bit early for this, but still. While researching music for the game I got inspired and though up a concept for the trailer. The idea I have in mind is imagery of falling (that’s something that is planned to be a part of how the story moves forward and the game’s visual identity - logo and such), some shots of cutscenes and gameplay (not revealing too much) and slow dolly shots of the environments while the protagonist reads out a heartfelt letter he wrote to his future self.

I think this would look quite nice, provide a few droplets of lore and also be on brand with how the game presents itself.

What’s Next?

Sadly, the progress regarding the rough prototype is still a bit slow I moved the milestone to 27.02.2026 but I’m honestly not so sure we’ll manage to hit that. Non the less, things are happening and as stated above, we’re focusing on finishing a rough prototype.