Hello and welcome to page about how two brothers knowing nothing about making video games, ended up making our game. 

Resident Evil, especially the early classic titles, were always a joy to play for us. 

My brother and I played every game of the series together.

 We loved the fact that you were in this maze of puzzles and could show your mental skills by solving puzzles. 

You were also surrounded by suspense and danger and could prove your combat skill.

There was something magical about this combination of gameplay. 

Unfortunately, the series started to take a big turn more toward action and stray away from its roots with every new release.

Little did we know, we would eventually step into making a game with the core of what we loved in the earlier titles. 

It all started a number of years ago, when we both started learning the basics of computer science and modern day programming.. 

Then in 2020, we briefly messed around with this video game engine called “Unity”. I’m sure  you may have heard of it.

One day, one of us asked the other if we could try making our first game, with gameplay similar to the genre we loved playing.

So we decided to give it a go. 

And little did we know this would be the start of thousands of hours of learning. 

We had to learn and do everything…. And I mean, everything.

How to make a character.

How to make the character move.

How to make an inventory screen How to make a main menu

How to put a weapon in the player’s hand

How to make cameras that change and move around.

How to add sounds when the player moves around.

How to equip and unequip weapons.

How to move from one level to the next.

How to make a puzzle.

Long story short, we spent a ton of hours watching tutorials and videos on how to do the most basic of things for our game.

With each new piece or feature created, we could slowly see something resembling a game starting to form. 

It didn’t look good, but we eventually reached the day where a basic prototype could be played.

The player could move around between two levels, inspect items and areas, pick up inventory.

We were excited.

But the work didn’t stop there. 

We had to learn

How to make an enemy character.

How to make them jump around

How to make them open doors

How to have them fight against you.

How to redo our programming code to be more flexible to support more features and requirements. 

How to fix bugs and problems that made no sense. 

And, after all of this, we had to come up with a story. And that was extremely challenging.

Because after all, the one thing you definitely DO NOT want to do, is simply copy other games you’ve played.

After many days of thinking and going back and forth, we found a story idea that was original, and fit the genre that we were going for.

And, that’s when things got even harder. We had to learn some really advanced stuff, such as

How to make a cut scene so the player can see a story? 

How to make the faces of characters move, and get their lips to speak.

How to do custom animations with a capture suit. 

How to get things to look custom and unique to our game. (Why did we pick this genre?)

How to hire actual voice actors to voice the lines in the game. God knows I wasn’t putting my ugly voice in the game.

But we spent a lot of personal money to achieve that very high quality. Ouch. 

At this point, we still had no name for our game. We went back and forth for potential names for weeks, and eventually decided on the name “Connection: The Nightmare Within”.

The word “Connection” fit our story, theme, genre, and the general gameplay concepts of connecting the dots and solving puzzles.

Finally, after about 18 months of development, we had…… a 30 minute game. Wow. All of that work for just 30 minutes!

But we didn’t give up.

We had something we could finally give to a few friends and family to play.

Every family member or friend who played offered tons of great feedback and advice.

“The story doesn’t make sense in certain parts”

“Why is my player teleporting through a wall and getting stuck”?

“This part is really boring”

Now we had to go back to the drawing board and redo major parts of our story, fix tons of bugs, and redo things we thought were complete and fine.

After making the game about 2 hours in length, we read that we should make a Steam page and a Discord server.

Steam allowed us to post a downloadable demo, and prepare ourselves for people on the internet who could play test. 

While Discord allowed us to have a place to receive feedback and post updates to those who were interested.

With all this in place, we made a few reddit posts, and a few very helpful people offered testing and feedback. With every play test, our game became more and more polished.

At this point, we took a break from testing and decided to push ourselves even further. 

We went from a 2 hour game, to a 4 hour game, that was more polished than ever before.

Eventually we picked up some lessons on color theory and lighting and re-did the lighting of the entire game for a much more professional, polished, and atmospheric look.

At the making of this post, we now have a playable game which is about 5 hours in length, with the potential to become 8-10 hours.

We also wrote the story in such a way that would allow us to make a few sequels.

With all that said, that’s been our journey from novices with a dream to the creators of 'Connection: The Nightmare Within.' 

It's been a rollercoaster of learning, challenges, and late-night coding sessions

We're grateful for everyone who supported us, and we can't wait to share the final release with everyone.

We hope you stay tuned

Until next time, happy gaming!