FIRST!

Hi everybody!

This being my first dev log here, I figured I should talk about some of the design goals for this game, where I'm coming from, and how I got here....

I've been a software dev for a long time, it's what I went to college for, and I did it professionally for a while. On the side, I created a handful of mods for other games that ranged in popularity from obscure to extremely popular.  The largest mod that I  created was for Minecraft, and it was called Ex Nihilo.

Three years ago, I decided that I wanted to take my game design talents and try to make a living with them. Doing that with modding wasn't possible, so I decided that I had to build my own game from the ground up. That turned out to be a lot more work than I anticipated, so I publicly announced my retirement from modding, gave my mods to other devs to look after them for me, and went on my new adventure into lands uknown.

Two years ago, I created the project folder that ultimately became Ashes of Gehenna. I've always loved the Immersive Sim genre and I had strong feelings that there needed to be more of them, and that their mechanics had become stale and overused.  I've also loved the emerging Survival genre, and I thought that what was needed there was a game with an actual goal and a sense of progression to prevent the game from dying in the late game. Gehenna was created to do both those things. An immersive sim that breaks away from conventions of the genre, and a survival game with an ending.

After I left modding, I quickly figured out that I had NO IDEA AT ALL what I was doing with 3D art. It took me months of long hours and hard work to teach myself Blender. After that came Substance Painter and Substance Designer. I picked up modelling, unwrapping, texturing, rigging, animating, etc. Much of my time in the first year was just mastering my 3D tools. Whenever I wasn't being crushed by the Blender learning curve, I was working in Unity to build the systems and mechanics that would make the backbone of the game. The crafting, inventory, levitation, progression, object persistence, and combat systems. The last couple of years of my life have been lonely, painful, and difficult, but hopefully worth it. 

I've broken development into phases. This prototype marks the completion of phase 0, my first major milestone. All the major systems are functional, and with a few small exceptions, the rest of the game's development should be mostly building out the world and story. I'll go into my roadmap more in a later blog post, so I won't say too much more here about it, but it's a major victory for me to have come this far, and I expect that in the long run, it'll be worth the sacrifices I made.

Please play my prototype, and let me know what you think of the direction so far!

Talk to you again soon.
- Erasmus Crowley