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[DrWayward]

What is Summerford?

Summerford is an indie survival horror game. Here's our Steam page, and here's my Twitter account. Game doesn't have one just yet.

We're taking inspiration from the golden age of Survival Horror: Alone in the Dark (the originals), Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

We were originally going for a Resident Evil 1-3 style of detailed backgrounds with low-poly characters, but we may now move away from that and try to find something a bit more consistent.

Why survival horror?

Because despite the popularity of the Resi Remakes, it's a genre that few people are tackling. The vast majority of horror games nowadays tend to be first person. This is great for jump-scares but it also means that many of them end up being walking simulators. Nothing wrong with walking sims, but we wanted something a bit more hands-on.

A lot of games list themselves as survival horror, but don't really use any of the mechanics from the original games. The Resident 2 Remake proves that you can use many of the same mechanics and still have a compelling, modern gaming experience... so, that's what we're trying to go for.
 
What's the story?

The game is set in the English village of Summerford. Summerford has been abandoned since the 1980s after it was evacuated due to reactor failure in a nearby nuclear power plant, and you play as urban explorers checking the town out.

What's the team / the plan?

We're trying to make a commercially viable game that's around 4 hours long in a single run by the middle of next year. This is our first full on game project though we've had experience in other creative industry stuff before this. We're very much learning as we go. As far as team:

1 x Programmer
1 x Artist
1 x Designer / Writer / Marking / Admin

We're also a family - our programmer and artist are married, and I'm their uncle. We've been working together as a family with other family members on and off for three years now, so we know what works and what doesn't. Also, thanks to earlier success in web dev, we're luck enough to be able to fully fund the game through development without any help!

Our very earliest screenshots which I'll leave here for prosperity:







Thanks for reading!

[DrWayward]

Over the next few weeks, we'll be working on our school and railway area, two important areas in act I.

We're trying to get our large meshes (The school house, the station building) into the scene as quickly as possible so we can work out camera angles and the general 'feel' of the scene.

Many, many passes later, hopefully we'll come out with some cool environments!

We're also working on actual puzzle design for the school, which is a larger area with hopefully with 10+ rooms that involves some combat, back tracking, puzzle solving and optional objectives. We're programming each type of puzzle - for example, pushing a bookcase - as we go along, so we think the school obviously take a lot longer than later areas.

On the other hand, we're sort of using the school as a virtual slice of the game-play itself which is, so far, working out quite nicely!

Our first playable character, currently named "Sarah"



School and Railway shots:







Some enemy concept art:

[DrWayward]

This week we've been mostly working on interiors, creating basic scenes with placeholders to work out shots and angles and potential routes through our the two areas we're working on right now, our school and our train station.

As we go we're updating our placeholder assets with our own models and textures, so some screenshots below are more 'complete' than others!

We've also got our first enemy in the game, Mr. Spores, who is our slow, shambling but dangerous-in-numbers enemy that's close to our version of the classic Resident Evil zombie. He can attack and kill the player, but we've not got any way to "fight back" yet.

Our school interior:


And our railway interior:


Next week will make the first month of working on the game! We're hoping to have all the rooms of both areas complete even if they aren't completely filled with our original assets. We might also get around to do some basic combat as well. One good thing about recreating the classic survival horrors is that combat doesn't HAVE to be too in-depth, but we'll see how that goes...

We're also doing a more in-depth blog over on our site that has some videos and 3D models etc. that I'm not sure I can actually embed on this forum.

[Claude Ruelle]

This is awesome! Hopefully, you'll make it as challenging as those early survival horror games.

[DrWayward]

This is awesome! Hopefully, you'll make it as challenging as those early survival horror games.

Thank you! We've got to work out a balance between keeping things challenging while also offering some QoL changes that make things more enjoyable / more streamlined.

[DrWayward]

Update #3

We're on roughly day 45 now! Large devvy loggy thoughts here from a few days back.

We're heading with a vertical slice demo to EGX Rezzed in London so it's kind of a race against time to get things in a presentable position for that!

We have some new key art that we're working on.. very much a work in progress!



A few new areas being drafted:





...and we're working on very basic inventory system as we prototype puzzles. We've got spinning 3D inventory objects, which are as much a staple of classic survival horror as zombies:



We're actually going to be doing a lot more UI stuff this week, but luckily we've got a lot of inspiration to draw from. I think it's likely we'll end up going with a phone/ pda style UI as that seems to be a shortcut for making something that's easily accessible.

[DrWayward]

A quick update! We've been busy working on our first area. We actually made a finished 'school' area for EGX but didn't get a chance to fully show it at the show due to an emergency with our other business, which was a bit of a bummer.

We've been tweaking and improving since being back at work though, mostly working on improving a lot placeholder areas we had with rooms that feel a lot more complete, and hopefully with better lighting.

Going for an indie MEGABOOTH submission as we'd been talking about going to PAX anyway and the actual show is far enough away that we know we'll have a really good build then. We've been busy pulling apart the systems we've created bit-by-bit in the first few months and building them again a lot cleaner with the benefit of hindsight.

Hopefully by the next update we'll have moved on to the next area of the game!

In the meantime here's some before and afters of the last few weeks of work. Firstly, widening the school corridor area and making it feel more abandoned / less clean:



And the rest are all changes to rooms within the school, 'before' shots on the top:

Classroom 1:


Classroom 2:


Nursery office:

[Keirley]

This looks really cool!

I'm curious - in terms of tone/story/etc. are you going for a more Resident Evil vibe, or something different?

[DrWayward]

This looks really cool!

I'm curious - in terms of tone/story/etc. are you going for a more Resident Evil vibe, or something different?

Good question! I think it's fair to split survival horror plots into the RE and SH camps. You can either make a more straightforward story like Resident Evil, or you can make a psychological story, like Silent Hill 2. We're leaning closer towards the Resident Evil side of things, albeit less camp and a bit darker overall.

I love Silent Hill and how it tells it story, but really successful psychological horror is also an incredibly hard thing to pull off - so hard that the Silent Hill series itself fails at it more than it succeeds! Likewise I think a lot of first time indies have tried to go for a Silent Hill vibe and can't quite hit that mark.

Update #5

We submitted a MEGABOOTH build. It's far from perfect but it's a decent vertical slice of where want to take things. There's only so long we want to spend polishing builds for events and shows that will never see the light of day when we also need to actually develop the game... the inevitable trade-off between development and marketing, I suppose.

Still, doing the work for that demo did push into getting some of the more boring / tricky things like saving states sorted out earlier than we probably would have tackled otherwise, and the stuff that's dragging behind like combat is not something we could have fixed in a couple of frantic weeks.

Some shots of the our church area and dock area:





The dock area is where the game starts, and should hopefully serve as a quick tutorial as well as setting up some information about the world and the characters. The church is a meatier area of the first act, and one of the major locations in the village itself.

Lighting is all off right now, especially outside, though we do intend to go for a deep sunset style of lighting for this act, potentially moving further into nighttime in later sections of the game.

Our current plan for the next few weeks is to expand out all the areas in this act of the game in much the same way as we did for our school area, by starting with a very vague plan of an end-goal and some story, then building the basic environments with asset-store stand-ins and then iterating on that.

Seems to work for us much better than detailed planning and design documents do, but we've always worked like this, even back when creating websites.

Thanks for reading!