Survival Horror

I quit my shitty retail management job to pursue a career in game development. Over the past year and a half, I've been teaching myself how to code, and decided to create my first commercial product: a text adventure game for mobile devices. I wrote everything, from the story to the programming code.

SURVIVAL HORROR is a psychological mind-fuck, and it is played through a combination of my favorite elements of CYOA books and text adventures. Instead of typing in commands, the player taps keywords to explore or make life-or-death choices. The puzzles and available inventory are random for each playthrough, so that the game can be replayable.

To create an immersive experience for a text-based game, I layered in ambient music that maintains the mood of each situation. In combat, the tempo increases as you lose health. When you break through a brick wall, you hear the stone crumbling with each impact of your sledgehammer. Footsteps, radio static, wood splintering and glass shattering. It may be subtle, but the atmospheric noise can swallow you up into the story.

You play the lone protagonist, an amnesiac in a savage dystopia, fending off relentless zombie-like enemies, searching for the way back home to rejoin your friends at camp. Your decisions affect the outcome of the story. For example, you can sustain injuries, like a broken arm or an eye gouged out of your face, which can influence everything that follows. As your character struggles for survival, you encounter gut-wrenching moral dilemmas. It is an unforgiving and brutal game, like any good horror story should be.

Due to its unsettling content, this mobile app may be too disturbing for some players.

This is my first effort, and I hope you agree that it is a good one. I plan on writing more, if people like what I'm writing.

I only perused the demo to check this out (so I am not scoring the game). This is a standard "wake up with amnesia - zombies are attacking your location" scenario, however the writing seems pretty good, and I got a very strong sense of atmosphere...aided by the ambient soundtrack and scare chords when something attacks.

There is what seems like a battle system, and a unique interface that I like a lot: Every word in the story is a potential hyperlink, so interacting feels more like searching and investigating rather than lawnmowering through pre-set choices. The player can click any permutation of "you" or "your" to see inventory. Text that pops up with a block around it is a non-interactive description and can be clicked to return to the previous passage, but this block text is also sometimes combined with text outside that allows the reader to interact closely with the examined object.

I'd love if this system were an Inform extension or its own touch-based fiction system along the lines of Texture.