In our last post, we promised an update "very soon". Obviously, after four months, we passed the "very soon" mark. Let's take a look at why that happened, because we've still been very busy since then!

A new game is coming!

We originally hoped to release an update adding a new game to the Collection about a month after its original release. We even had a game that looked almost ready: PsyCam, a point'n'click game we made during a game jam in 2022.

A game with an original premise: all the interactions are made through CCTV monitors!

How the game looked like at the end of the game jam (was also localized in English)

The jam game was technically complete: it required you to pick up some objects and interact with the environment, to ultimately open all the doors of this small jail complex to escape from it. I was only bothered by some interface issues: some interactions with the monitors required the keyboard arrows, and it was hard to convey in the tutorial which was only a series of texts.

That's why I modified the game to make sure it was playable with only the mouse, and modified the tutorial accordingly, to something that was ultimately more linear and, as a bonus, more integrated into the story.

A glimpse of the tutorial-story

Other that than, it required a bit of polish: a proper menu, sounds, prettier lighting...

But after playing through our tutorial, we realized the game felt even shorter than before! What happened was that the game was guiding you through roughly 1/3rd of the required interactions in the game, so there was not much left for the player to figure out after that.

How the game looks like in its current state

So we had to come up with ideas to extend the game, which was probably the hardest part of the work. In the end, we added some systems that weren't there in the original game, to support our puzzle ideas, which I'll leave you as a surprise to discover. It's still a short point'n'click adventure, but hopefully it'll make you scratch your head a bit more!

We made this project a challenge for ourselves, but personally I'm enjoying adding things to it, since it's a point'n'click with a first person perspective, it fondly reminds me of a time I worked at a company where we ported old adventure games in this style (like Amerzone) from PC to mobile and created new ones (like Dracula 4).

Then my body said "Let's add More challenge on top of it!"

In the beginning of April, I had pretty much finished coding and mapping all the required changes, and Biiscuit had almost finished modelling all the new objects required for the new puzzles. At this point, I wasn't making a lot of the progress in the evenings and the weekends outside of my day job anymore because I was having recurring headaches.

Then I had to stay at a hospital for a whole week, where I was told my kidneys were almost not working anymore.

Now I'm back home, there's still some uncertainty about my health, this will have to be monitored, but we're back on making our final polish on this game!

Our progress will be slower than we hoped, we'll be taking it easy. We'll try to give you this update for real in a few weeks.

See you when the game is out!

To conclude, some behind-the-scenes pictures of a new room and a new object you'll interact with