Hello, dear players.
For those who might be curious, I’d like to share a bit about how Tezcatlipoca came to life and the process behind its development.
From the very beginning, I had a clear idea: I wanted to create a horror game set in contemporary Mexico. I didn’t have the characters or story defined at first — and maybe that’s why the narrative feels a bit weak, since it was honestly the last thing I worked on. What I really wanted was a game with tank controls, puzzles, and an oppressive atmosphere.
At one point, I considered adding combat, but soon realized my current knowledge wouldn’t allow me to properly implement weapons, ammunition, and enemies that stayed dead after being defeated. So I made a key decision: there would be no direct combat. Similar to Haunting Ground (a game I really like), I wanted to rely more on atmosphere. That game features stealth mechanics, but I didn’t feel capable of designing scenarios complex enough to make full use of them.
Instead, I created a single main enemy: the Llorona/Screamer, an entity that reacts to the sound of the player’s footsteps. That way I could still maintain a stealth element, even if it was only focused on one enemy.
I also knew I wanted two first-person scenarios, which gave birth to the labyrinths. The first one, set in a school, was a very simple prototype; later, I expanded on the idea with the labyrinth inside the pyramid.
The lore of Tezcatlipoca
I always knew the game’s protagonist would be Minerva, a great friend who has always supported my projects. Beyond that, I didn’t really know what direction to take. For a long time, I even toyed with the idea of making the entities extraterrestrial.
While looking for fitting names in the Nahuatl language, I remembered one of my earlier projects, Tits and Shadows. That game had a very small scenario inside a pyramid, with a villain called Tezcatlipoca. I thought it would be a great idea to expand on that little story and reinterpret it from a new perspective.
Human sacrifice and my own culture are deeply connected — almost symbiotically. Once I decided Tezcatlipoca would be the “villain,” everything else became much easier to piece together.
The basic story I wrote goes like this:
Minerva arrives in an abandoned town but finds herself unable to leave. The road to another village would take hours, maybe even days on foot, and as we all know, traveling on highways at night is extremely dangerous. So she ventures into the city and begins to see shadows of the past.
Most of the inhabitants have disappeared, and some of Minerva’s old acquaintances appear only to show her their mental state crumbling away. In the end, she faces two options: leave the town, or delve deeper into its mysteries and uncover her family’s history.
I know it’s a simple story, but my goal was always to make it effective. Honestly, I’m terrible at writing stories and characters, but I poured a lot of myself into this project. In fact, all of the characters are based on real-life friends, so I also wanted to treat their images with respect inside the game.
In short, Tezcatlipoca was born more out of a desire to create an oppressive atmosphere and gameplay experience than from a carefully crafted narrative. Over time, though, I found the threads that tied the mechanics to the myth — and to my own cultural roots.