Hey everyone!

I’ve been pretty absent since I released ANOTHR, and I wanted to take a moment to talk about what the game is, what it was supposed to be, and what happened behind the scenes.

ANOTHR is an experimental short horror game about a fictional sentient DRM system that haunts a canceled lost game from 2011. It was heavily inspired by Source engine games like Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and especially the Interloper series by Anomidae. It’s a weird little game, and despite all the jank, I had fun developing it.

During development, though, it stopped feeling like a passion project and started feeling like a chore, something I just had to get done to receive a decent grade. And honestly, it makes me sad to admit that.

It all started as a group project for college, something we do every semester as a kind of “final paper,” just at the end of each term instead of the end of the course. There were only six people in my class, myself included. Unfortunately, two classmates and two of my friends had already formed a group, leaving just me and one other person.

I was suggested to team up with him. I had worked with him before during the first semester, and let’s just say without getting into details... it was a total clusterfuck of an experience.

Since his presence alone was a risk to the entire project, I went completely solo. It was the risky option, sure, but it guaranteed the game would actually get made.

I started in Unity but quickly moved to Unreal, which is my preferred engine. Even though I didn’t fully understand how Blueprints worked, I still knew my way around and was already comfortable with level design. Prototyping was faster, so I figured the switch would make development easier, right? Nope.

The original version of ANOTHR was meant to be a Blair Witch-style experience with a mid-2000s internet vibe and a camcorder aesthetic. Then it shifted into a Silent Hill-inspired game set in the same cabin. Then it shifted again, and ANOTHR as you know it was born.

To be honest, I’ll take the L for all those reboots. I had to limit the mechanics because I was learning Unreal as I developed the game, which forced me to constantly scale things down. And if you got stuck in a puzzle or felt confused about what to do, that’s why.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I had to move to a new apartment mid development. Painting walls, organizing boxes, moving furniture, all while trying to meet college deadlines.

By the time I wrapped up development for ANOTHR in December, I was completely burned out, mentally and physically. To the point I didn’t even open Unreal again until this month.

What started as a weird and fun little game full of passion and spooky ideas eventually fell apart because I didn’t really know what I was doing. Add academic pressure and a big move to that, and... yeah. I’ll take the blame for the “I didn’t know what I was doing” part.

And come to think of it, I never even submitted it to the college. I just uploaded it straight to itch.io and immediately transferred to another college. Ah well, at least I got to publish my first game.

As of writing this, I’m not actively working on anything right now. I want to focus on learning Unreal Engine properly this time, take things at a slower pace, and experiment with small, fun ideas before I commit to releasing something again.

ANOTHR may have diverged from the original idea, but it taught me a lot, mostly about organization. Even if some of the ideas didn’t fully land, I still had fun making it.

So that’s about it! I was planning a follow-up to ANOTHR, and you might have noticed some Base64 and Morse code shenanigans on the itch page. There’s a story there, a beginning and an end, and I already have some of it fleshed out. But it’s not happening right now. I won’t promise that “ANOTHR2” will actually happen, or that I’ll even make it. I want to make sure I know what I’m doing before diving into a project again.

Thanks for reading, and take care!

– FinnyFang