Posted September 30, 2024 by BatWorks
With HorrorVale releasing in only a little over a day now, I can't help but think about the long journey that led up to this point, and I felt the need to talk about it.
I am Dustin Andrews, Lead Designer and Artist for HorrorVale. In addition to leading the project, I created most of the art, characters, story, and wrote just about every piece of text in the game.
I started this game alongside my best friend Matt Rock in 2016 on a pure whim. I thought a traditional turn based RPG with a Spooky theme would be a cool idea, and Matt offered to make the music for it for me.
In my original early drafts for HorrorVale, I envisioned a very different game than what it became. It was only going to be around 8 hours long. A very small game you'd finish quickly and then move onto the next.
However, as I fleshed out my ideas, the game quickly got larger and larger, until it's now become what may be a 50 hour experience for many.
From around 2016-2018, Development was very slow. I just messed with the game a little here and there as a small hobby. Once I felt like it was in a decent enough spot to show people, we wanted to publicly announce it. Our idea was to get the game out there in a playable state so we could look toward crowdfunding (Patreon or Kickstarter) as a means to fund the game.
To be honest, when it was initially announced it was very hard to get noticed. Although some small Let's Players did give our Demo a try, it didn't gain much traction, and I began to wonder if the project was worth continuing at all.
It wasn't until a YouTuber by the name of "NitroRad", checked out our game in January 2019 that things took a completely different turn. Suddenly, tons and tons of people joined our community. Our Patreon slots filled up in no time at all. As if in the blink of an eye, a small but dedicated community of fans converged around the game. I don't think I can ever thank that man enough for helping make that possible, because it likely saved the game from getting cancelled.
In the time since, that small community has helped me stay focused and motivated to keep going and reach the destination we're now out. Over time, several from that community even joined our team to help out, whether that be volunteer Testers, or Artists who helped with Maps and Character designs and more.
Besides that, Matt also worked very hard over the past few years putting together an amazing soundtrack that ended up 170 tracks long. Matt, I'm sorry that the small hobby project you offered to help with ended up becoming a big huge adventure.
I don't know how the game will do. I would like it to do well so I could become a full time game developer. I would like to continue the story of HorrorVale and do more things with it in the future, but it might also not do so well. Perhaps I will simply make back the money I put into it, but not much more beyond that.
No matter what may happen, I am still extremely happy that I managed to finish it. I am the type of person who struggles with starting projects on impulse and then not sticking to them. So knowing I was able to stick with this one for so long and finish it, it fills me with an immense amount of happiness and pride. Even if people don't like it, I am satisfied that I made something I enjoy and am happy with.
HorrorVale is a goofy nonsensical adventure about creepypastas and vampires and slime salesmen.
It is also a story about overcoming loss and grief, and finding happiness and purpose even when things seem grim.
It's a story I wrote not long after my Father passed away in 2016. I think that it reflects many of the things going through my head at the time as I coped with feelings I had never experienced before.
I hope that after everything is through, you will feel the same attachment towards Alice and her friends that I feel.
Thank you to everyone, for supporting this dream of a young skeleton girl and her dog, because I will never forget it.
-Dustin Andrews
Lead Designer for HorrorVale