One from the vault: Eerievale

To show my appreciation that you’re here with me on this journey, I open my vault and give you an exclusive look at a piece of unreleased video game history.

Without further ado here is the latest Windows prototype of my graphic adventure game Eerievale in first person view and from June of 2005. A time when creating your own games meant building pretty much everything yourself and the common term was homebrew games. Indie games were not yet a thing.

If you were part of the Atari scene at the time, the title may ring a bell. Otherwise chances are low that you’ve heard of it, despite the title being planned as a multi platform title for the Atari Jaguar, PC and Dreamcast and being on display on a small booth at Games Convention 2005 in Leipzig, Germany.

Eerievale Trailer for Games Convention 2005 (Patreon exclusive)

Background on the game

Here is a little bit of background to how the Eerievale game came into existence.
It all started on the Atari Jaguar in early 2003. My seventeen year-old self at the time was a big fan of horror and adventure games. So I decided this was what I wanted to create.

However other than the official version of Myst, which was ported to about every CD based console at the time, an adventure game was never done for the Jaguar.
Homebrew games usually ran from the internal 2MB RAM. Few people could make cartridges (up to 4MB) and they were expensive. Very little space for a full adventure game. Also if you grew up playing adventure games with a mouse, it’s hard to get used to cursor control with a joypad. Making the adventure game I had in mind seemed impossible.

In November 2003 I surprised the community with a first playable demo of my game, based on a custom adventure engine I had written. Fellow developers provided code to support a mouse and read data of a CD. I guess it must have looked impressive.
A lot of hype unleashed around the game, despite little actually being known about the story. Being young and having little self-esteem anyway, this pleased me.
I was just learning by doing how to make games at the time. Not only how to code, but also graphics and game design. And people liked what I did!
A year later (2004) I presented a new demo on Euro JagFest. The technology and artwork had improved quite a bit.

Another year later in 2005, with the help of my brother I had yet another version of the game running on Windows, but it was never publicly shown.
I also had written my first novel draft that the game was supposed to be based on.
Again learning by doing. I had not written much else outside of school. It felt great, but I knew it was rough. Fortunately my Game Design study was just about to start.
What I didn’t expect was, that my priorities in life were about to be turned upside down. I spent three hours travelling to University five days a week, then there were the courses, so there went my spare-time.

That’s how the prototype I’m sharing with you came into existence. (Attached file)
There is a bit of backstory. You can explore most of the estate, but there is not much interaction with objects yet.

If this post was too much tech babble for your taste, fear not. The next one will be for everyone.