Four years ago the last thing I posted here was a couple of clips of cats walking. I’d been struggling to make them work with root motion rather than capsule-driven movement, it had finally started looking right, and I said so in the What Are You Working On thread. Then I went quiet.
The work didn’t. The game those cats belong to is finished. It’s called The Beast Awoke to Eat Your Darlings, I built it on my own, and it comes out on October 27.
What it is
A horror puzzle-stealth game. You wake from a two-year coma with a hole where your memory should be, and the same five nightmares keep coming back. Each one has a Beast that keeps cats in cages. The way out is at the top of the tallest building, and the elevator won’t run unless one of the cats is standing next to you.
Why it’s a puzzle and not a chase
Nothing in it is random. The Beast sleeps until it’s hungry, or hears you, or a Sentinel fires a flare — and a flare always brings it. When it’s hungry it would rather eat a steak than a cat. Pet a Sentinel from behind and it melts into a beer puddle; the Beast stumbles into puddles, and the other Sentinels drop what they’re doing to dry it out.
That’s most of the rule set. The rules never surprise me — they do exactly what they say. What surprises me is watching a playtester chain them into a route through a level I never thought of.
Three of the five nightmares play in full daylight. You can see the Beast, you can see the open ground between you, and you know its speed to the step, because it never changes. That turned out to be worse than hiding things.
Dying isn’t punished
Die, and on the next run the game offers you an extra helping item. Refusing the offer is what scores. The leaderboard measures what you turned down as much as what you survived.
Made by one person
Design, code, art direction, sound design, and a soundtrack composed and performed live on a Moog DFAM and a Subharmonicon. Most of the 3D models are licensed from Fab; a couple of collaborators worked on textures, UI icons and the logo. No generative AI in the assets. Built in Unreal 5.5.4.
I spent twenty years working on big games with big companies. This one is five levels and one person. I’d been missing the craft, the part where you build the thing with your own hands, and this is what that turned out to be.
Content note: the story deals with drug use and dealing, bullying, homophobia, psychological abuse, the death of an animal and the death of a young person. There’s no gore, and violence is implied rather than shown. The full warning is on the store page.
Steam page, if you want to follow it: The Beast Awoke To Eat Your Darlings on Steam
The cats still run on the root motion from those 2022 clips. Considerably less broken.
I’ll keep this thread going. There’s a demo in October’s Steam Next Fest, then launch on the 27th.