The story behind Under The Rain
My name is Telmo Pereira, the creator of Under The Rain. I am a 31 year old geek, programmer, artist, and of course, gamer.
I worked a lot in digital art, web development and developing web based apps for private corporate use, and about a year ago I wanted to give it a try at game development. So I started developing Under The Rain, and slowly (but steadily) my idea began to take shape, growing from a learning experience to a passion project. As the mechanics and game play where coming together, I started to develop a story, and started to like it. A lot of the story as a personal tone to it, dealing with some issues that I believe we all can identify with: grief, sorrow, loss, insecurity...
As a gamer in love with survival horror, I felt like the genre was taking a turn to a more action-oriented style to appeal to a broader audience. As such, I started a journey into game development, creating what seamed to me a good survival horror adventure, trying to combine game play ideas and concepts for a survival horror game that would be more faithful to the origins of the genre: a dark game, with an eerie atmosphere, difficult combat, limited save points (with no checkpoints or auto-saves), some stealth elements and puzzle solving.My greatest inspirations come from the original Silent Hill, Alone in the Dark, Siren and Resident Evil series from the PSX/PS2 era, combining game mechanics and ideas from these beloved series with others featured in more recent titles such as Until Dawn, Alan Wake, Dead Space and The Evil Within.
My idea is to combine the best of the old classics with more recent games to bring a survival horror experience that will satisfy the more mature gamers, the ones that were there when the genre started to gain more popularity.The game will also feature a rich, mature story, combining many narrative elements and locations from the tales written by H. P. Lovecraft together with it's own character driven story arc.
The main character is Samuel Carter, a young man who has had a strange accident 3 years ago and lost his memory. Recently, Carter is being haunted by a recurring nightmare that becomes more intense as time goes by. This nightmare is starting to manifest during Carter's waking hours as hallucinations, showing him disturbing visions, and it seems to be calling him to Arkham. He must then investigate the abandoned city and discover it's secrets, his own past and what ties he has with Arkham.
The current development status
Well, at the moment, it is (kind of) halted. The computer I was working on broke for good, and at the moment I am unemployed, and out of resources to continue, so I started a campaign at Indiegogo to try and get the funding I need to complete my vision. Those funds would allow me to complete the game, and not just by myself, the budget is to also hire some artists to aid me with the development and speed up things.
As such, the development now is more theoretical, as I have been writing down ideas for the game and also been working more in-depth on the script.
I am going to start making some more concept art and all I can do without a computer. If the crowdfunding campaign fails, however, this project will have to be put on hold until I can finish it, which can take quite a while...
And so, I guess that's it, the story behind Under The Rain and me. Feel free to ask anything else you want.
Don't forget to visit and share/tweet my indiegogo campaign page (and if possible, maybe donate...).
You can also find a section dedicated to the project in the Higher Eclectic Ground page on facebook, they are a very interesting collaborative project for artists and developers, go check them out.
You can also check out my youtube channel or steam greenlight concept page for all the videos and images of the development and latest updates.
Also, you can find info about the project at facebook, twitter and the development diary blog.
See you on the next post.
