How we started The Dead Roam Free

Welcome to our very first development blog for our game The Dead Roam Free. 

We are a small team from the Netherlands. It's just Jan Schortinghuis and me, Andreas Tabak. We met at the local basketball club and immediately didn't like each other very much. That changed when we discovered we had two things in common: playing videogames and wanting to make a videogame ourselves. Now we didn't like each other but needed one another.  And that is what we did; we started working on our first game which would be an RPG game in the style of the great classic Myst. Jan was the developer, and I was doing the 3D graphics. We worked on it for quite some time; unfortunately, we never got to finish it. You see, we discovered the pub, beer and dreamily looking at girls while imagining we would have the courage to talk to them. We shelved the game.

That was 22 years ago.

We've been best friends for what feels like an eternity. Having had a decent laugh (and drink) along the way. Sometimes we would talk about making games, but we never really found the time or inspiration to start it up again. 

Then one funny thing happened two years ago when I had a bizarre and very visual dream. It wasn't a nightmare, but it also wasn't a comforting dream. It involved some mad psychic vampires that would feed off the corpses of victims. I never remember my dreams when I wake up, but this dream was an exception, remembering every detail. It was such an intense experience that I realised I needed to make a game based on it. I immediately messaged Jan with my initial thoughts, but I just wanted to ask him if he was interested in creating a game with me. He didn't have to think about it and said 'yes' immediately. 

The team was back again, and now it was time to finally create an outstanding game, just like we wanted when we were teenagers.

But where to start? Game creation had come a long way since we were playing around 22 years ago.

To be continued in our next devlog