For as long as we can remember, Jake Davey and I have had a great fondness for video games. It's actually how we met, playing the Arma 2 mod Wasteland (for those of you who remember). We formed a group of friends and would jump on after Uni/work almost every day and play games like Dayz mod, Dota 2, Rust, Hunt Showdown, The forest and Escape from Tarkov. Little did we know, we'd both end up moving to Sydney and becoming good mates in the real world.
While I was focused on building a career in directing, Jake was building his in Audio. We always talked about how cool it would be to make our own game, but it wasn't until about 12 months ago that we started taking it seriously. We realised our respective careers and mutual love for video games was the perfect foundation to make our own.
We knew we wanted to create something different with Macabre, to step outside the typical haunted house or abandoned asylum and instead explore new territory. We also wanted monsters that are scary smart, that felt alive - not just mindless grunts that kill on sight. It's all about creating a unique, immersive horror experience set in a world players haven't explored before, and boy, do we have some cool stuff in store!
Funnily enough, I'm an absolute scaredy cat with it comes to horror, but just like with watching scary movies, it's so much more fun with friends. Not to mention multiplayer horror opens up so many avenues. You can work together, but you can also mess with each other, which makes for a lot of hilarious scenarios.
We reached out to my former colleague Maximilian Rea who had embarked on a similar journey around five years earlier to create his dream game Hell Let Loose. Max has been gracious enough to mentor us through the process of building an indie studio and setting things up to succeed.
Over the next few months, we were lucky enough to begin working with some incredible artists who saw the same potential in Macabre that we did. Rythilian, who was a big part of the Rust modding community, helped us with our landscape and environment. Joshua Culp worked on our creature concept art which is terrifying, BTW. Ricardo Ciaxe did the 3D sculpt, and Morrissey Alexander, who has been building out our lodges and helping with hard surface modelling. We also were fortunate enough to meet Ben Sutherland, our incredibly talented and awesome programmer.
We're all working towards making Macabre the best it can be, and we can't wait to show you more of our progress!
