I've just posted a trailer of my upcoming game being developed alone and now I'm going to tell you more about its features.

Fevercide is my fourth project where I am not solely responsible only for the music. The code, art, game design and everything else is on me. That was the case with Fearmonium, Catmaze, and Reflection of Mine.



Fevercide is mostly a metroidvania, but this time I wanted to blur the genre a bit. It was a very dreary feeling when I started working on this project after finishing Fearmonium. It seemed to me that I was not making “something new”, but making "something again”. That's why, first of all, I added horror elements to the game.



The childhood of the main character Sandra was not the most glorious, and when the plot brings us to her memories, the player is faced with the uncharacteristic metroidvania sections: darkness, helplessness and evil creatures all around. I have a peculiar attitude to horrors and I can't call a game horror when the player gets the role of a brave marine with a firearm. That's why I completely redrew all of Sandra's animations, rejuvenating her by 15 years and dressing her up in a nightie.
I feel that I really need to explain in the game that this is not a dress - but a nightie, for it is 1922 and sleepwear looked like this. These days, such clothing is actually called a "dress".



The main way of interacting with the world in this part of the game will be solving puzzles, finding places to hide from monsters and contemplating from around the corner all sorts of unpleasant scenes that took place in Sandra's home.



The main part of Fevercide will unfold on behalf of the grown up Sandra, who is able to fight. However, I still didn't want to write off the formula of classic metroidvania games again. This time I've divided the entire world map into separate biomes with separate maps for each. The number of interconnections between them is not so large. This means more linearity than in my previous games. If I were to draw an analogy of what it's like - from modern games I can remember the first part of Blasphemous, and from the classics - the delightful Monster World VI, the great Popful Mail and the perfect Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.



Of course, there will still be forks in Fevercide - I try to create levels in such a way that the player always has at least two options of where to go now. A lot of secrets inherent to the genre won't go anywhere either. I've already solved the problem that haunts every developer of a metroidvania game: it's not hard to create a bunch of passages that require either attentiveness or a certain skill to traverse. What's hard is to put rewards in those passages that will motivate the player to look for geocaches and be happy to find them.



My solution is a lot of small improvements to Sandra's arsenal. I didn't go deep into role-playing, but I piled on an unusual number of stats for the genre: in addition to HP, MP, and Physical Strength, the speed of each weapon; the strength and availability of special attacks for that weapon; how quickly melee attacks replenish mana; how ranged attacks use up mana; and so on. There really are a lot of characteristics, and I enjoyed playing with their math more than I expected. Literally every type of weapon has a separate screen with equipping special beads that change its properties and give sometimes unexpected results when combined. Sandra can easily be made fast and weak, slow and strong, reshaped into a sorceress, rely on blunt force or rely on critical hits, and so on.



The non-linearity will also hopefully be added by the large number of side quests, which I'm struggling to make smarter than “kill them/bring this”. Some parts of the locations will only be unlocked through various errands from a bunch of non-playable characters. These quests also help me experiment with gameplay by adding some mini-games. For example, this is how lock picking and pinball appeared, and the end of the game depends, of course, on collecting all the beads and completing quests.
Emphasis on the story - this is the thing that attracts me in other games, and I'm not going to get rid of it, so now I'll explain the plot. First of all, the time of action will be between 1922 and 1932, and the place will be the Russian Empire. There was no revolution in Fevercide universe, so religion still plays a big role, and the Empire is ruled by the Tsar. I'm not claiming to be historical, I'm just combining epochs and images I like and fantasizing about "what would it be like if...".




Sandra grew up in a very strange family in a huge, half-abandoned house. Her mother was constantly ill for no apparent reason, and her father - Victor - not only never paid any attention to her, but was always working with some monsters, disappeared for months and constantly attracted misfortune to the house, never explaining anything. As soon as Sandra's mother died, the girl hastily packed her things and left this slumbering mansion, going to St. Petersburg.



There she successfully hid from her problems, constantly woke up in a cold sweat from childhood memories and built a not very successful career as a dancer. But running away from the past is impossible, and at the very beginning of the game Victor makes himself known. He has chosen a method that is as dark and bizarre as he is: Sandra receives a letter addressed to him, and in the envelope is a ticket for a train leaving from a long-abandoned station at midnight. The ticket is followed by the appearance of all the evil spirits she encountered as a child, and she would have been killed instantly in her own apartment, but the second protagonist has remedied the situation: a ghost who has forgotten his name and calls himself Duke is the reason why in Fevercide all the weapons are trinkets like a cane and a hat pin.



The Count is a kind of poltergeist and can inhabit objects. Things that have a special meaning for Sandra are especially powerful. That is why beads from her mother's necklace give her additional abilities; the suitcase with which she ran away from home becomes a formidable weapon, and a hat pin becomes sharper than a knife.



The main goal is to finally deal with her past and why Victor was so crazy. Hiding your head in the sand forever is not going to work.



The visual style of Fearmonium was inspired by classic Disney cartoons: first of all, Pinocchio. The game was compared, of course, with another project, taking its stylistic roots from the same cartoons as me, only drawn by 40 artists from Disney - I'm talking about Cuphead, the comparison with which really came as a surprise to me at the time. We both drew ideas from the same sources, not each other. My love for the classics hasn't gone anywhere - Snow White, Black Cauldron, Sword in the Stone... oh, how much beauty there is there and how unattainable the level I aspire to. Nevertheless, I don't want to copy Disney 1 in 1, and I think that the choice of style with these costumes, hairstyles and overloaded with all sorts of effects gives my game a twist. What I will be compared to visually this time - I don't know yet, I just announced my project. So it will be even curious, what Fevercide evokes associations with - feel free to declare it in the comments!



I really hope I'm making a project that will interest a lot of people, and those who are already excited - I'm waiting on the page in Steam clicking on the "add to wishlist" button -

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3314140/Fevercide/

The game didn't lie in a dusty and dark corner all this time, but kept getting better and better: Catmaze went through hundreds of little changes and got a little bit neater - all the changes "polished" this game a little.

- Fixed tons of sounds;
- Interfaces have become more accurate;
- Some textures were Redrawn;
- The physics of some objects were changed;
- Balance was slightly adjusted;
- Fixed a lot of small bugs that you did not know about!
- Lots of text improvements, especially in English and Japanese translations.

Next important news is that the game has been released on all the modern consoles - and now you can... buy it twice to enjoy a fairy adventure on another device!



And also, after active discussions with the community, I decided to provide access to the version of the game in which the portraits of the characters have not yet been changed - Alesta looks much older there, and her aunt looks much younger. Many other portraits are still "new" in the because new ones look actually much better

In order to access this version, you need to select Catmaze in the application list in the Steam client, right-click on it, select "settings" - "betas" and select the "originalart" branch there. The game will update and the portraits will change.

If you come across a bug, problem, or just want to ask a question - I'm always glad to see you in the Catmaze community!

There are a bunch of small changes I hid in this update. All of them, when put together, bring a lot of improvements!

What's new?

- Added a button to change ranged, melee familiar and a button to change equipped item;
- Added four new languages: French, German, Spanish, Japanese;
- Added new portraits for some characters (I will not argue, I failed in drawing some of the previous portraits I failed);
- New English translation!

What had changed?

- Improved controls in the sections with a wolf;
- No more death from a single touch of the flame of Chernobog;
- Improved controls in the broom section;
- Puzzles in Nav are much simpler from this moment;
- Some sounds were replaced;
- Some bonus items were redrawn;
- Fixed a bunch of minor bugs, which does not make much sense to list.

The game gets better with your help! Thanks!
I hope that with this update I did not spawn even more bugs, but if I did, please report about them in the appropriate thread!

Hello everyone!

Finally this day has come and my third game - Fearmonium - is able to purchase on Steam!



Now everyone can try to take an unusual role of a phobia in the mind of a teenage boy!

The most important thing for me now - your feedback. I really wish to make this game as good as possible and I can do it only with help of your words!

Your reviews and support now are super important for me and for the game.

What I'm planning next is strongly connected with Catmaze: as I gained more experience while working on Fearmonium now I want to turn back around to my previous game and bring some improvements to it.

Stay tuned!

After hard work I finally added Linux support! Currently you can play Catmaze on Linux x64, Steam OS, Windows and Mac. If you find some problems with launching - feel free to report about them and I fix them as soon as possible.

Also I fixed a few bugs some bugs you guys reported me about. Feel free to let me know if you find any new stuff I need to fix.

Thank you for playing!

Also don't forget to take a look on my new project that is currently in development:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1068360/Fearmonium/

The answer is psychedelic metroidvania where you play as a phobia.



Hello everybody, my name is Slava, I’m from Russia, and I am preparing the release of the third game that I made almost alone: music is the only piece I’m not responsible for. I make everything else myself. Having only a master’s degree in psychology, I dived into game development five years ago. I think it’s worth explaining a little about how it happened to bring a better understanding of what is going on in here. A small introduction will help to adequately perceive everything that jumps and flashes in the recently published trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovoxPGS1AqQ&feature=youtu.be

I was interested in psychology even at school, and not for typical reasons: I was not motivated by the desire to deal with my own “demons” or to understand people around me. At the age of 17, I went to programmers university preparatory courses. There I was surrounded by guys in knitted sweaters and with virgin moustaches on thoughtful faces. The next day I was brought to courses in a pedagogical university, where I was the only guy in the audience. Young girls all around me, and the audience full of fragrant scents of women's perfumes. Stunned by what I saw, I confidently decided to study in this paradise.
That’s how I began to break my life.



In my “career” of a psychologist, the most reasonable decisions were: to drop dropping the psychology to hell; silently leaving graduate school; retirement from a kind of a foster home, where I worked for three years after graduating from the magistracy and fully devoting myself to game development.
I made these decisions not because I wasn’t interested in psychology anymore - on the contrary, while I was studying, I began to penetrate the structure of human minds. However, this profession did not allow me to express myself creatively. I always wanted other people to enjoy the worlds that were born in my mind. Knowledge of psychology helped in building my own life and in creating fictional characters, but it’s difficult to call it a high-paying profession in Russia. It would be possible to strive to open my office, but my heart wasn’t in it, and I’ve chosen another way.



Job in a social institution forced to constantly look for a part-time work. Although I enjoyed spending time with children from difficult families, moving from my parents and meeting with my “second half” forced me to earn a little more than I used to. The payments in social institutions in Russia are very-very low. I couldn’t do anything except digging in people’s minds with a bottle of whiskey, but I was familiar with Photoshop. I knew how to draw using Macromedia Flash, so I decided to find ways to apply these skills.
And I found it. People often look for artists on the game development forums, and those who had a severely limited budget doesn’t need particularly luxurious graphics - I could easily draw a pair of sprites for 5 euros. My desire to get at least some money helped me to improve my drawing skills. I really didn’t know how to draw. I simply drew and redrew everything until it satisfied the “customer”.



That’s what I used to draw back then.

A year later, I realised that I could completely create graphics for my own game. I only needed to find money for a programmer. The whole thing was in the distant 2014th year, and nobody was aware of the coming “indie apocalypse”. The games were coming out at a crazy oace, and the tools for creating them became easier and more accessible. I saw that artists are no less in demand than programmers, and came to the conclusion that if I had improved my drawing skills to a level allowed me to create a whole game in two years, then how long would it take me to learn to code too?



It took no time at all. I installed Construct 2 and things rushed. Two years later, my first game came out: Reflection of Mine. It was a dark and hardcore puzzle about a girl with multiple personality syndrome. I chose this topic because I wanted to use all my knowledge and skills in this project, and by that time I was the most advanced in psychology. And the engine...
Almost nobody takes Construct 2 seriously. This is an engine for creating two-dimensional HTML5 games, but when I started working with it, I didn’t even know what HTML5 is. I saw that dragging the windows in C2 produces quite a working “exe” file, the launch of which opens the doors for people to the world invented by me and introduces to the characters invented by me. What else do I need?



I still do not know. The games that I created with Construct 2 work! They are played by thousands of people around the world, and all the difficulties and bugs that some players suffered from were caused not by a “crooked engine”, but by my own hands. I didn’t face any problem that I could not fix in the future. Also I didn’t see any 2D-game mechanic that I could not recreate with Construct 2.
Now, however, the engine is dying, Construct 3, in my opinion, is horrible, and since the company making this product is moving into the abyss, at some point I will remove Construct 2 from my PC forever.



So what am I working on now? Fearmonium is a psychedelic metroidvania, where the player takes under control an unpleasant memory, seeking to become a phobia. The visual style is not inspired by the game Cuphead. To be honest, I’m not a big fan at all - the eternal battles with bosses are more tiring than pleasing to me. But still, I admit that this is a great game. I’m just a fan of exploration and I suffered from lack of it in there. Cuphead's visual style emerged from the twentieth-century classic animation, and my inspiration grows from there too.
However, I have never been a fan of the drooling intensity of short cartoon films about Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop. Although I was fascinated by the frame-by-frame animation in these creations, I never found them inspiring. And just before working on Fearmonium, I understood why: it was all about the music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31j4DIpgY9U

I saw several unofficial videos of the musician named GHOSTEMANE - the authors took cuts from the cartoons of the first half of the twentieth century, put some camera shake and glitches on it and mixed them with aggressive and dark music, reminiscent of my beloved Witch house. This setting hooked me up. I chose a dark palette, a dark plot, dressed it all in the style of old cartoons and began to work.
The very procedure for bringing the game to its current state was as follows: in about two months I created a small demo version, where I had already chosen the visual style and gameplay. In February, I presented it at the White Nights conference in Berlin to look at the reaction of the players and to understand whether I was moving in the right direction. It turned out that in the right one.
From February to this day, I worked specifically on the trailer, and, frankly speaking, I turned the project file into complete chaos from broken levels and a real mess from objects called sprite1, sprite2, sprite100, but order was never my thing, and I'm sure I’ll get away with this.



Phobias aren’t growing from the void. Most often they are born from disturbing memories and bloom on the “compost” of negative states. The memory can be perceived by us as worrisome even without any obvious unpleasant factors: a person can see a clown or a spider under absolutely normal (seemingly) conditions, but these images are so firmly stuck into his head that it can transform into a serious neurosis. The unconscious will take care of this.
Fearmonium begins with a story about a fair where a boy named Jimmy saw clowns, and although he didn’t like them very much, he didn’t expect to wake up in the middle of the night from their appearance in his dream. Sleep has an important function of “squashing down” memories of the past day. Things we saw during the day affect the things that we will see while we sleep. A person doesn’t store memories in the form of text files or photographs, they don’t even look like a movie: we think in “images”. And how one or another image is treated depends only on the person. Absolutely same images can mean very different things to different people.



Bright images, seen by Jimmy at the fair, became his "protectors" when player converted his dream into a nightmare. That is why the first enemies we met were all that he liked from the previous day.
Interaction with enemies is not limited to waving a hammer. Two properties of phobias are involved in the battle with memories. First: neuroses affect the images in our memories. A “patient” suffering from a phobia will hardly be sure whether he saw a spider or a clown a year ago. It will seem to him that the subject of his fear was always somewhere near.



Secondly the phobia is not related to a specific item, it relates to a whole class of items. All that is associated with clowns becomes painful for Jimmy. People who are afraid of spiders will not divide them into types and panic from the appearance of some specific spider, they will be frightened by everything that their minds connect with spiders.
In this way, we “fake” Jimmy’s memories by turning enemies into balloons that Jimmy strongly associates with clowns. Where there was something light in his memory — bam — and a balloon appears.
In addition, we will meet other clowns in the memories of Jimmy that the boy has seen in throughout his life, and take them into our "army", using these memories as weapons against bright images.



But the very purpose of the game is not to drive poor Jimmy crazy. A phobia is not always as destructive as it may seem, and this is the main idea that I want to convey.
Neurosis doesn’t appear from a good emotional state. Stress, constant anxiety - a great “compost” for depression and phobias. Jimmy's life is not wonderful at all. His consciousness was already a chaos before our appearance. I will not go into the details of his life that drove Jimmy into the abyss of misfortunes, but I will say that in his situation, no one except Jimmy himself can save the situation.



And one of the features of phobias: the displacement of the objective fears. And "objective" does not mean "reasonable." For example, being late to school is an objective fear, but even such a minor phenomenon can be accompanied by an absurd amount of stress. Our indecision is often caused by the ridiculous amount of experience over trifles, which are perceived as something very important. With the presence of a real, severe neurosis, trifles are again turned into trifles, and only clowns seem to be a serious threat.



I briefly retold some things that I reveal through Fearmonium. The plot will affect the nature of depression, and standard methods of protection against neurosis, and a bunch of things that I caught at lectures at the university. But I remember an important rule - the best story in the game is the one that can be ignored. Fearmonium may well attract someone with funny pictures and dynamic gameplay, but scare off with its internal seriousness. So, in the game it will be impossible to get confused even if you don’t get a grasp of all the subtleties of human consciousness, and the “educational” part of the game is purely optional.

I believe that games can say more than “click on X to win”, and I try to develop this idea.
Don’t forget to add Fearmonium to your wishlist!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1068360/Fearmonium/

I never stopped making games - and I wanted to thank all the players that supported Catmaze!

Your feedback and your positive energy gave me strength to develop my third game that is finally got a steam page!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1068360/Fearmonium/

However, I'll never stop support Catmaze - so feel free to let me know about any issues you faced.

Here goes Catmaze 1.06!

It's the most serious update I made. What's new?

- Character's speed is now much faster

- Character's physics improved. That made controls less "clunky"

- Fixed jumping system near the edge of the platforms. Now the player have a possibility to jump a few moments after Alesta begins to fall. That makes the character more responsible

- Screens changes three times faster from this moment

- Fixed a bug when Alesta stuck in the chests

- Fixed a few more minor issues


I'm still working on Catmaze, so feel free to report about any bugs you find - I want to make this game as good as possible!

I’m glad to announce that Catmaze is now available on Simplified Chinese.

Also last weeks I worked on optimization to minimize the risk of freezes and slowdowns that some players faced. I hope the game will work faster, but still it’s not the limit.



Please report me about any bugs - I will try to fix them as soon as I can so you'll be able to enjoy Catmaze!

- Fixed the camera behavior on moving platforms, now it moves with the character.

- Fixed some rooms where player was able to stuck in the walls