DevLog #1 - Foundation

Salutations my fellow gamers!

First of all, let me just quickly thank you for reading and joining me on my adventure making my first game ever. The plan is to document the entire process of developing a game by a team of 2, who have no prior professional experience. 

What is "What happened in Penance"?

When I was trying to come up with an idea for a first game I had few key criteria that I wanted to follow:

1. It has to be a simple game, that could be developed in a reasonably short time.
2. The game mechanics should be kept simple.
3. It should serve as a training ground for future projects.
4. It has to be finished and published. No ditching halfway through.

After taking all of the above into account I have settled on the idea of making an exploration horror game. It is a pretty saturated genre and it's almost impossible to make it big right away, but I never meant for the game to be a cash cow, but rather a practice run. I want to see the process through the end, so I can learn from it and, hopefully, so my next game is better.

Gameplay

Keeping things simple, but not too simple is a bit of a challenge. Going too ambitious was a struggle and required a lot of back and forth with the concept. On the other hand there's also an issue of oversimplifying things. After all, if you make things too simple, can you still call it a game? 

After few weeks of deliberation with my partner in crime, we finally reached a good balance in terms of gameplay mechanics. The decision was to include things like:

• enemy AI that would stalk and interfere with player progression
• stealth elements so that the player has means to deal with the enemy
• exploration - with the story being the main driving force in the game, the player has to pay attention to the environment 
• a few puzzles here and there 

This might change over the course of development, but for now I'll be focusing on fleshing out the systems mentioned above and hopefully it will be enough to make an interesting game.

Story

I mentioned story being the main driving force in the game.  This is mostly due to my personal preference, as I'm enjoying games with rich and interesting lore the most. Another thing is that horror is the most effective and engaging when it has something more than just jump scares and gore. It needs a good story to stick with you and haunt you when you go to take a shower late at night. 

The story follows Ethan Mason who, for as long as he can remember, has been haunted by visions of an unknown place and mysterious woman. One day he finds his grandfather's journal from which he learns that he wasn't the first in the family to share the same affliction. The diary mentions a village that seems to be the same place from his visions - Penance. Determined to discover the truth, Ethan sets out to find the village hidden somewhere among lush American forests.

Engine & tools

Knowing what mechanics and what kind of game we wanted to make it was time to pick an engine. Despite there being quite a number of options, for me the choice was down to Unreal Engine or Unity. Considering that I am the most familiar with the former and also having the most enjoyable experience with the engine, I settled on Unreal Engine 5. Coincidentally, stable version 5.1 was also just released, so I felt like it would be a great opportunity to learn UE5.1 at the same time. Time has shown that it is not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's a story for another time.

Developing the game with UE gave me access to Megascans library, that can be used for free as long as the assets are rendered and used within Unreal Engine. This was invaluable help, considering our budget oscillating between 0 and 0 USD (sad broke indie dev noises). 

Everything not provided by Quixel Megascans or cheap/free marketplace assets I will be making myself using Blender. Fortunately, I've been working with Blender for a few years now, so it isn't an issue. 

The fortunate me also got a perpetual license for Substance Painter & Substance Designer at the last possible moment, so this made a lot of things possible.

The biggest challenge will be sound design and music, that I have no prior experience with. Fortunately my partner, Boba 2, has this part covered with their extensive plugin & samples collection. 

Outro

At this point we've been working on "What happened in Penance" for almost 2 moths. Up till this point it was mostly conceptual work and prototyping. We wanted to have a solid foundation, before we dive into more detailed work. We wanted to avoid putting hours into working on something only to realize it wasn't going to work later down the line.

In future devlogs, we're planning to go deeper into some of the topics mentioned in this post, so both me and Boba 2 hope that you'll stick around for those. Oof... thanks for reading this far! That was a long post.