zema1

Back in Jan of last year, Martin and I (the founders of zemaGamez) had come back from the holidays and we're ready to get to work on our next game project... but we weren't exactly sure what it would be.

We had just released our 5^th mobile game, "Primary Extra Credits" (a spin off of our more successful puzzle game "Primary") and had noticed a few disturbing trends with our current, small catalogue of mobile titles. Not only was discoverability in the over-crowded app stores becoming more and more difficult to achieve without a massive marketing budget -but our games were also getting progressively simplistic. We had always wanted to create engaging, visually rich games -but found ourselves moving in the opposite direction game by game as we hunted the fickle, more mainstream, casual gamer that dominated the mobile game space. After a long, hard look at what we had achieved so far, and what we had ultimately set out to do, it was clear that we needed to move in a different direction.

I spoke with the team about it the following Monday - We spent the day chatting about what we were currently playing or had recently enjoyed, and surprisingly, it seemed as though we we're all craving
something a little darker... I guess we all needed a change from the colorful and poppy mobile puzzle games we had been working on for the last 8 months! We also wanted something bigger to sink our teeth into creatively, something to show what our small, 6-person studio could do. So we decided we would do a complete 180, abandon mobile, move to desktop and make a 1^st person survival horror game.

I couldn't have been happier about this decision. Not only do 1^st person games occupy the most space on my personal game shelf, the horror genera has also always been close to my heart ...plus I had an ace up my sleeve.

Prior to founding zemaGamez, I had spent over 10 years working in the film industry here in Vancouver. In that time I had been lucky enough to meet and work with some extremely talented and creative people. One such person was Kody Zimmermann. We met years back on one of Kody's many indie film projects and went on to work together on a few short film and video projects from time to time during the years that followed. We shared a mutual love of comics, horror, sci-fi and film in general and I knew the second that we had decided on a horror title, that Kody was the man to write it.

(Kody at Screamfest Horror Film Festival -pedelling his short film "The Familiar")

At the time, Kody was in the early stages of development for his his next film with producer Rob Cowan (The Conjuring, The Crazies, Chernobyl Diaries) called The Hollow Season. It's in the haunted house / psychic phenomena genre, part Legend of Hell House, part Carrie. He had a small window to do some writing and cut scene direction before his film went into production and agreed to come on board.

We had a few creative / development meetings to discuss the setting I wished the game to take place in as well as the scope. It would be important that Kody know just what would be achievable for our team
to produce and what wouldn't be. From these meetings, we were able to put together an outline that we used as the backbone of our story. Kody continued to write -while I got to work conceptualizing the characters, locations and the world our game would take place in.

Over the next 4 months -the team built everything we needed for our Greenlight Submission. It certainly wasn't polished - but it looked great and would give people an idea of where we were headed. We posted our promo and gameplay footage on Greenlight and The Ritual on Weylyn Island was officially born. 2 weeks later, after an overwhelmingly positive response from the Steam community we were greeenlit. From there it was full speed ahead!

Our small dev team (which has never been more than 6 people and now sits at just 3) has been working on the game since Feb 2014.
We are planning for a Steam Early Access release of our first 3 chapters this summer to collect user feedback and implement further revisions if need be as we finish our final chapters.

The full release is scheduled for Fall 2015.

Keep up to date on our development by following us here on IndieDB.com
on twitter @zemagamez
or visit our devblog at zemagamez.com/blog