The Camera that Bleeds (Demo)

SUMMARY

The Camera that Bleeds is a noir horror mystery game where you solve spooky mysteries using a camera that can see into the supernatural world. 

This project started as a little game jam while my friend Davis and I were attending college, and over the course of several years it attracted nearly a dozen talented collaborators with the hopes it could become something great. To make a long story short, after several years of working on demos & pitching to publishers, we failed to get it off the ground and decided to shelve it indefinitely. Years later, I've finally gotten around to making a publicly-accessible itch page with some playable demos of the project.

I plan to write a more full postmortem sooner or later, but not tonight! If you end up playing the game, thank you for your time and please let me know what you think of it in the comments!

CREDITS

Alexis Lipina - Engineer, Designer, Technical Artist, Art Director, Producer
Davis Snider - Engineer, Designer
Michal Zadok - Character Modeling, Player Animation, Music Composition
Arthur Tisseront - Voice Actor, Audio Engineer, Foley Artist
Jacob Irizarry - 3D Artist, Level Artist, Art Producer
Jesse Burby - 3D Artist, Level Artist
Leah Tyler - 3D Artist
Ryan Welsh - 3D Artist, Rigging & Characters
Victoria Lofaro - 3D Artist
Tae Won Chung - 3D Artist
Jesenia Roberts - Social Media Manager

BUILDS

2022 (Final) Demo contains the "vertical slice" we were working on, which was intended to be a representative level in the full game. This is basically the final state of the game before it was shelved. Technically this is slightly earlier than the state we left the game in, but later builds are basically unplayable due to a lighting optimization plugin breaking. 

2021 Demo contains a previous iteration of the game before some significant pivots to core structure and mechanics, namely the concept of ghosts that move around and leave trails behind them that you follow. It contains a tutorial level (which I personally think has the most tight & fun little miniature 15 minute puzzle-mystery we ever made) and a larger vertical slice level similar to the 2022 demo. During the process of creating this larger level, we realized many aspects of our design at the time did not scale well to a larger mystery, in addition to the game having several UX & "what do I do now" design issues, which precipitated the changes present in the 2022 version.

Radio Revamp Prototype contains a... prototype of a radio revamp! We had an idea to fundamentally change how scenes & the radio work to center the radio as a primary detective tool rather than merely a minigame you interact with just to get an "audio note", which is how it works in the 2022 Demo. In this prototype, the radio acts like a playback control device, allowing you to "play" a local supernatural scene, hear it taking place around you, and pause it at opportune moments to freeze the scene's state and allow you to explore it with your camera at the right moment. Very similar to Tacoma's mechanical premise. I was really excited about this direction but we shelved the project shortly after the feature was developed.