I've heard some call The Sims 1 the first survival horror game. While that's probably not true, it certainly felt like that at the time. Sure, the burglar couldn't murder our sims in their sleep, but who could fact check that with early 2000s Google?

Early Star Wars games always had a very run down look to the world design. A lot of wood, stone, concrete, etc. It always made it feel like the world wasn't sci-fi, but just a really old galactic civilization. Great example is Baron's Hed in Dark Forces 2 from '97. Certainly an aesthetic on its own.

Flashlights are cool, but you'll start to realize you're wasting screenspace. With your current setup, the walls are always present, always pushing in on the player and giving a sense of having little room to maneuver. Affecting player psychology is as important as limiting their visibility.

I get you. It is a bummer. It was for me at first. I managed to fall in love with my blocky little people, but everyone has their own taste. The way I've personally seen it is that I hope that these blocky little people will enable me to have the really cool realistic people I want one day.

Hell yeah, that looks great. And I can relate. Inanimate things, fine. Living things.. That's why I personally went so low res, so that the living things end up looking like blocky robots, but have just enough detail they look like a person. An alternative is to make very abstract characters.

I really appreciate a horror game whose art style uses a more ambient and distance-based lighting instead of relying on a flashlight where you only see a circle in the center of your screen. You've got a nice vibe going on in your demo there, very good art direction thus far!

Multiplayer implementation scares me. But damn would it be cool to have...

I can't draw either. It's a curse. What I suggest? Get into pixel art. Really low res pixel art. Like 16x16. It becomes less about drawing and more about piecing together a puzzle. The mind does so much more work to fill in the blanks. If you're not fond of pixels, you end up learning to love it!

This is great, I love these sorts of things. I hope you can throw drinks into the faces of unruly customers.

Getting into Bluesky right as it seems to have an influx of new users is making me feel like I just installed AOL for the first time and everyones in the chat rooms. That or I am just really old now.