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…