Hello detectives,
The Séance of Blake Manor is out now, and we have been so excited to see how much you have all been enjoying the game.
Today, we wanted to tell you all about THE CURSE- the strange occurrences that bled from the game into the real world and nearly killed us along the way...
As with any game there were development setbacks and hiccups, but The Curse goes well beyond that...
It could be said that this might have been a curse of our own making as someone thought it was a good idea to meet for a team sleepover in a haunted house in Dundalk... Of course we’re not pointing fingers.
There’s been the usual spate of inconvenient illnesses throughout the entire development process, merges that wiped a bunch of pushes, the times that Gitlab space was totally full coming up to launch.
There was the disaster with the voice overs, or should we say disasters: voice ID files were overwritten and half a day was lost to repair broken conversations in a game with over 100,000 words. Not to mention the issue with the VO mastering, that meant very last minute, very unexpected extra hours to get every one ready for launch.
Then there was Unity. Pushing a big update to Unity Version Control caused a number of issues for 2-3 days and then a day to actually switch over to the new version. Add into the mix the security update that required the demo to be taken down and repaired that caused more behind the scenes problems.
No, all that is par for the course with game dev. The real toll the curse took was on everybody’s health and homes – random stuff breaking, cars failing, and proper illneses - organ failures, appendicitis, feelings lost in one side of the body, stroke symptoms, and even – gasp – a poorly timed baby! (okay, the baby is lovely, but the timing was definitely cursed. Same due date as the game... Too very different launches, that).
Misfortune was not limited to those working directly on the game, oh no. When friends of friends offered to help their family ended up in an accident. Another offered help and lost their job later that day. After that we stopped asking for help...
And, finally, we lost count of the amount of times a cat sat on the power button of the build machine at just the exact wrong moment.
It has been a challenging road to Blake Manor but now the game has launched we’re hoping that the curse has been appeased...
The Séance of Blake Manor is OUT NOW
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1395520/The_Sance_of_Blake_Manor/