Dave and I have been wanting to develop a game for a very long time. We’ve been working together for nearly 25 years. In that time we have developed e-commerce websites, extranets, eBusiness systems. That required a lot of different skills, obviously including programming. Those projects also needed a lot of understanding of systems, developing architecture, logic and integration with other systems. I had spent many years also in the covering of games for magazines and websites. So it seemed logical to us that one of the things Blue Donut would do is to make a game.
It took a lot of time before I started making games, and that turned out to be card games, which I didn’t expect. However, that was actually a great way to get down to the nitty gritty of making a game. It took a few games and a lot of help before I felt confident enough to do it on my own and I had a lot of help.
I had made interactive multimedia games for business but only ever part of an interactive application – so called Mini Games. I needed to do something more complex.
I worked on a few card games with a friend and then, after many years later, and after a lot of false starts I came up with a simple idea of a game made around tiles that rotated and it was going to be a Victorian Horror Game. This is how Horror in the Library came about.
The development of the board game took about five years to complete it to the point where I could raise money on Kickstarter to mass produce the game and at a high standard.
Whilst I was developing the board game Dave and I created Imersar and started developing immersive experiences in Unity for mobile and desktop. This was so important as it gave us amazing client work and more importantly a lifeline during covid.
Dave and I had developed our apps to allow users to access immersive custom branded spaces and interact with video, posters, and live streams. This was critical for our customers who relied on events to inform and engage customers. This gave us work when many of our friends had none.
This experience did not go to waste. We improved our own tools and knowledge of developing games and added VR to the range of platforms we could use to deploy on.
This is when we realised, we had an exciting opportunity to make a game and the knowledge to do it.
I have been privileged to be asked to be involved in Pocket Gamer events for many years now. This a place where I met and learned from mobile game developers and got to work with some wonderful people. Over time Blue Donut Studios became a regular appearance on various tracks. And the start of 2024 saw us finally exhibit as well as talk about games.
For us VR was a natural choice to start developing our first video game for. We had spent several years developing mobile, desktop and VR immersive apps. The on-the-job training of developing and making a growing games business brought it all together into Horror in the Library VR.
Marcus 🙂
