This is the final part of the Design Diaries series. You can find Part I here. We had a choice to make. Now we both spent another year on the project, still as a hobby, and mostly because we liked it. We needed to make a choice, publish or don’t publish. All kind of stuff that you don’t think about is required when you go from simply doing a thing to forming a company to bring that thing into production and publishing. This was the last chance to step…
This is the third part of the Design Diaries series. You can find Part I here. Breathing life into deathAt the start of this journey I set out to design the game alone, along with the support of my partner and close friends. They helped me keep the project on track with a combination of hard truths and endless patience for my obsession. I really did not think about publishing, other than as a possible abstract idea. For the longest time the game was simply not ready, which meant…
This is the second part of the Design Diaries series. You can find Part I here.What about the living? The visitors were the unfortunate human characters trapped in the spirits’ domain, unable to find a way out. The visitors needed ways to interact with the spirit player but their goal needed to be something else, something that they could aim to accomplish regardless of what the spirit wanted. The premise was clear. What gives ghosts power over others are often the horrors thatformed them. The mystery of their…
It was the summer of 2018 and I decided I needed to do something. Working full time as an automotive engineer was interesting and fun, but some of the challenge was gone, and I was getting anxious. Designing games had been in my blood since I was a child, but I had never done so professionally, which is about to become evident to the reader. Regardless, I decided to take 6 months leave from work to force myself to get it out of my system. It had…
"'.. some places are just lost to time. They no longer want to be found. What you are asking about is such a place.' said the old woman. 'I know you have heard the stories, but the truth is none of them truly know. We used to say to stay away from the cliffs of the Wrightwatch. Even if you survive that fall no one will hear your calls for aid.' She rested her head in her hand, the evening-long conversation had sapped her strength. "'You have been very…
"It wakes. The fragmented mind. Restless, a rush of emotion as you relive those final moments. You taste the blood again, feel the sting of betrayal. The anger swells in you at these recollections, but something is different this time. You feel the strength of life nearby. A visitor. "As the spirit you play differently from the other players, and is only rarely allowed to communicate with them. A veil separates you from the living, and piercing it is difficult. Each time you wake you are overtaken…
"As you enter the hall dust rises in the stale air, shimmering in the moonlight. You recognize this hall although you've never been here before. A place abandoned by time, and forgotten by all. All except you, it seems. You touch the brass handrail and shiver as it welcomes you home. "As a visitor you will play together with the other visitors. You are drawn to the mystery of the old manor and will attempt to uncover its secrets while being haunted by the spirit that dwells…
Welcome back to the third and final article in this design series. Today we are going to deepdive on a key topic in horror, and also of horror boardgames. As we have seen a key to achieving horror is immersion, something we are focusing deeply on in our design of The Presence.Immersion is the bond between the mind of the player and the world of the game. It is the degree to which the player agrees to suspend disbelief and accept the outcomes in the game, not…
Time to look at some games that attempt to do proper horror, what we can learn form them, and how they will have influenced our design of The Presence.
In my research for The Presence i tried to delve as deep as i could in existing horror titles. This is a subject very dear to my heart, and as a lover of board games and horror fiction I find the challenging crossover between them an interesting subject to explore. What follows is a series of reflections and the start of a small blog series on horror in tabletop games. Why Horror? The area of horror is sometimes looked down at in the movie-space as something that…