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.