I'm a huge fan of the pixel dithering style in games like World of Horror and Return of the Obra Dinn, so once I played Hyper P.T. and saw what the original software that inspired all the other games could do, I knew I had to make something with it.

Hyper P.T. was originally made as part of a game jam, so I started with using the resources left by the community that organised it. The page even says they would leave it up for other people to use/deconstruct games with, so thank god they did that.

In May 2020 I got started,  with just the idea of modelling my apartment and having a small demo that could be walked around in, point-and-click style like Myst. I took photos from all the angles I wanted to be viewed from, and traced them by eye.

Around the time I finished up the original demo, we were moving out from the apartment, so as a prank I left behind a copy of the game on USB and hid it in a crack in the wall to creep out whoever may find it. (I've attached that version to this post if interested)

After moving, I was in a Lovecraft-binge mood and had just re-read The Whisperer In Darkness and thought maybe I could make a very simplified loose version of it in Hypercard. I fired up the Macintosh Plus emulator and began modelling my new apartment to connect to the old one, and have 2 apartments that the player could travel between. I began calling the game 'The Neighbour in Darkness' and started thinking about all the cool stuff that could be in it. I thought "Wow it would be cool if the game story took place over days and the player would have to solve all these puzzles to progress, and they could have an inventory system and all that jazz".

And thats when I stopped working on the game.

It stopped being a fun side-project and became this huge, conceptually bloated mess in my head, and it lost the original appeal. It was a fun idea, but I didn't have any motivation to see it to the end.

Months passed and I hadn't touched it, but it still occupied my mind a little. I wanted to move on and do other things but couldn't stop thinking about the game I had left behind.

After several nights laying awake thinking about it, I thought I'd start working on it again with a new direction. I wasn't going to add all the features I had dreamed of, I was going to add 1 feature: BE FINISHED. I'm just one person, who hasn't made a game like this before, using software that's almost 30 years old. It didn't need to be an epic masterpiece, it just needed to BE FINISHED.

I started working with a rule for any new ideas: "If I can't make that idea a reality in one day, throw it out". This really helped keep focus and not start anything that would get in the way of the game being finished sooner rather than later.

It's a simple game that took months to make and minutes to finish, and I'm so relieved that it's actually fucking done.