All In Your Head (AIYH) is a horror game under development where you take on the role of a left-behind young man who has to spend the night in a cabin that was meant to be a destination launch party with his co-workers & friends. The cabin is located in a beautiful & secluded hill of the country-side. But seclusion can also mean lack of access to resources & unchartered territories.
This blog serves as a devlog for the game.
Finally releasing this project’s demo. I thought indie horror games nowadays are getting very similar, jumpscares and short. So I thought I’d learn game development and do the exact same thing again – but it will have voice acting!
All in your head is a single-player first-person horror game. You find yourself in a cabin alone and your goal is to finish what you and your friends came here to do, but alone. Beware of Miley, a girl who roams the areas, because all you have is your phone’s light.
This is my first ever indie game project, I hope to tell a good story. The demo is about 15-20 minutes but it’ll give you a feel of the whole game. I hope you enjoy and let me know how I can improve it.
All in your head game – Solo Game Development Journey
It has been more than a year since I have posted anything in the blog & I’d like to take this chance to give an update and reflect on the unexpected setbacks I have faced.
My journey towards solo game development began just over a year ago, when I decided to take the plunge into the world of game development. It has been an exciting, yet difficult journey filled with many challenges and obstacles. In this post, I want to acknowledge all of you who have taken out the time to either follow me on this website or on the mailing list and update you on the progress of All In Your Head Horror Game.
Setbacks
The biggest setback I have faced on my journey towards solo game development is an unexpected personal incident in 2022. It was one of those things that can crush you, take you by surprise and leave you helpless. Completely out of my control, I had to go to my country for about 3 months, completely takin a break from my solo game development for about 5-6 months.
Additionally, solo development has challenges of its own. Wearing so many different hats can have its toll on you. This has meant dealing with all aspects of the game development process, from coding to design, which can be overwhelming at times.
Progress
To help overcome these unexpected setbacks, I have had to refocus on my motivations and prioritize tasks in order to stay productive. Of course I’m doing all this while having a 9-5 during the day.
One thing that really boosted my motivation was the fact that opening the project after 6 months, I could see that it had hit 300+ wish lists. So even when away, people kept subscribing to the game which feels great. You too can wish list it here: All in your head Steam Page.
I have learned many lessons along the way, such as the importance of planning and creating a roadmap for the game’s development journey. This has helped to keep me on track and ensure that I am making steady progress towards my goals.
Of course when enough time had passed and responsibilities fulfilled, it was time to open my project again. I did so by late 2022 and thought about writing a blog immediately. However, I didn’t want to write without having updates about the game itself. Therefore, I write this now with some great new features to share with you.
HDRP
All in your head is now using the High-Definition Render Pipeline. Which means its going for high-fidelity graphics and is going to support a lot more visual effects than before!
Initial renders using volumetric fog in HDRP
Controller Support
Yes that’s right! Maybe this is a future-proofing kind of thing but even on PC, now you’ll be able to play All In Your Head using your preferred controller!
Controller support for All in your head
Storyline
Remember how I mentioned that the main storyline was 20% done before? Well now it’s much more than that. Thankfully I’ve had the pleasure of having very creative friends who have been helping refine the story line and making it more consistent!
More Voice Acting and Writing
Being a solo developer, I will try my best to have good graphics, good frames per second etc, but my skills will limit to how good it will be in the end. One thing I WILL NOT compromise on is characters and story-telling. And that’s why I pay people to do professional voice acting for the characters in the game. We have our 2nd character’s voice acting done! happy dance
Twitch – Live Game Development Stream
follow me live on twitch.tv/usamakzafar.
I’ve been starting to do a live game development stream on Sundays. I go live, people join and give suggestions, and we make improvements to the game together. Join me next time, simply follow me on twitch, I’d look forward to your advice! Follow at twitch.tv/usamakzafar
Next Steps
We’re back on track working on visuals, audio and the story development. As always I’m always encouraging you to follow me on twitter for more frequent updates. I am now looking forward to continuing my journey and focusing on the future of my game development.
Needless to say, the release date had to be pushed to 2023 as opposed to late 2022. Rest assured, the game is turning out to be much better than it was before.
Thanks again to all my followers who have supported me over this past year!
p.s. If you’d like to support me in this journey, please share the steam link or my twitter with your gaming friends!
For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been working on making the cut scene – the first one, which would introduce the first part of the story to the player. What I’ve learned is that it’s much harder than I thought.
My assumptions before starting
I thought that since I have experience with animations and key framing, I would have ease going through the cutscene animations. After all, I have rigged characters ready to animate, all I need is a reference footage and I can start animating! Spoiler alert -> I was wrong. So very wrong.
Characters
Even if you have rigged characters, you might not have what you need. There are countless amounts of different rigs that different engines use to animate a character. E.g. Some characters might have 25 bones on their face just to control their expressions, others might just have 1 head bone because they don’t require facial expressions. They might be okay with just the head movement
3d Software
It took me 2 weeks just to get comfortable with Blender – an open source 3d software that many indies like myself use for animations, modelling and sculpting etc. The community is amazing and supportive, I had tonnes of people volunteering to help out. A special shout out to fudgenuggets87 whose great advice on reddit encouraged me to start learning blender.
Reference Footage
Note to self -> It’s impossible to record your own video from an orthographic view rather than a perspective view. It’s impossible to align your own reference footage with the animation because there will be no amount of angles that you can use to compensate for the fact that your camera has only 1 lens. And if you don’t use a reference footage, you risk animating your characters a little too cartoonish. Here’s what I mean:
Trying to sync the movement with my reference footage. Note how the feet and arms are not aligned fully because of the perspective of the camera
So where am I now?
Finally, now I am fluent enough with Blender to produce an acceptable animation. But still, it takes me 3 hours to do about 15-20 seconds right. Having said that, All in your head game will not have more than 3 3 or 4 minutes of animated cutscenes. So I think we’re good for as far as the timeline is concerned.
Here’s a sneak peak of the new features of the level. What do you think?
As always, feel free to comment your feedback, email me or follow me on twitter. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you in the next one.
