Trailer for The Seance at Blake Manor

I worked for four years at kickass indie game studio Spooky Doorway as a Unity developer (occasionally filling in for my boss when she’d take parental leave). I learned a huge amount working there, and loved helping build such fun, well-loved games. Even though they’re graphically simple, games like The Darkside Detective and The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark, were still huge amounts of work for engineering to get out the door stable, performant, fully localised and on all platforms. We even shipped on Google Stadia!

Eldritch House Demo

When I was interviewing at Spooky Doorway in the summer of 2020, one of the directors made clear that the company was very proud of the Darkside Detective games and would hopefully make more in the future, but they were also keen to continue to evolve, in tone, mechanics and technology.

After we shipped The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark, our next project was a short demo of Eldritch House, a first-person noirish detective adventure game set in Connemara just before the turn of the 20th century. We leveraged technology developed for the Darkside Detective games, and extended it to support new gameplay.

Once we’d finished it was shown to Raw Fury, who picked up the project and when we were ready to move onto it, we started preproduction, building technology, fleshing out designs and planning for all the content to go into the game.

The Séance at Blake Manor

I left Spooky Doorway for another opportunity when we were several months into production, and while I know it was the right move at the right time for me, I was sorry to leave such a cool and ambitious project. Living in the West of Ireland, it’s amazing to see a Galway game being made to such a high level and I can’t wait to play it when it comes out!