SENSE/s: Death Harvest

Halloween 2086 - a blood moon, All Hallows Eve and a Witch's death curse converge and spread horrifying evil over a small farm just outside of Gettysburg, PA. While putting the finishing touches on the haunted corn maze for the local Halloween festival, Ollie Zhai is trapped in a gruesome nightmare as the maze is twisted by the dark magic of what was once believed to be a local urban legend. SENSE/s: Death Harvest is a new merger of cantonese horror and local Pennsylvanian folklore, a nightmare that can only be made by SUZAKU!

Death Harvest will focus heavily on quality survival horror combat(melee and gun), have faster pacing, and more closely mirror Hong Kong horror mixed with something in the style of the Evil Dead narratively. We are opting to continue in the fixed camera/tank controls, as wandering through a corn maze stalked by a 12 foot demonic entity and her minions should make for a really tense and fun experience.

A few months ago we announced Project office. You may be wondering what happened to that project. Well, if you missed the last few posts, we are still making it BUT the scope and narrative of that game is really big, and due to the subject matter it tackles we know that we will need to take our time with that game and make sure that every part of it is done with care. In many ways it will act as a true narrative sequel to Sense 1. While writing and planning it, Kayi and I just realized that we wouldn't be able to make and complete that game the way we want in a time frame that makes much sense for us right now. So we opted to back burner it for a while and focus on a project that we know we can knock out of the park at our current level, and that has a bit wider appeal. I will go in on this more in our devlog, hopefully in a more clear and concise way, but to sum it up - we just knew that right now we can't make Office the way that we want unless we got a few million $ dropped in our hands haha.  We are still working on Office, mostly in concept art, character design, and writing, occasionally making assets where we can though. and the last 8 months-ish of dev in UE5 has been on this, luckily none of that needs to be fully abandoned. I will also continue to upload updates for concept art when it feels right to do it. but we are definitely not going to be splitting our focus. Death Harvest deserves 100% of our attention.

Our other reason for switching over is related to a video put up by Bokeh game studio on their youtube. In the interview with Makoto Shibata (the director of Fatal Frame) he spoke a bit about authenticity, and how making fatal frame set in japan and using his experiences crafted a world, story, and horror that only a japanese studio, and more specifically he and his team, could deliver. Those words hung on me for a while and made Kayi and I really look at what we are making and if there was something that we could make that authentically. So we came up with a story mixing the urban legends, ghost stories, and culture of the area I grew up in with the magic, folklore, and culture of Hong Kong. I really believe that Death Harvest is something no one else could make, and I hope that as you watch our devlogs and follow along as we make it, you will see that authenticity and SOUL oozing out of the game.

We will return to Project Office once Death Harvest is done and out, and as usual we will take everything we learn, earn and discern forward. I really really want to make Office. It's a game that has been bursting out of my mind and heart for 4 years now, but I think it's Ollie's turn at bat first, and as a small town farm girl, she's got a hell of a swing.

I'm working hard on the first devlog video now, and will upload it here, youtube, and rumble asap. I think sometime this or next week!