Hey everyone!

My name is Yulia, I'm the author of Yuha’s Nightmares and the prototype of the game's main character.

In this first diary entry, I want to tell you about the journey the game has made to the present moment and share my future plans.

The idea for the game came in 2019. I was going through a hard time, and my nerves were pretty frayed, so I wanted to make sense of what's going on, to put things in order, to restore my calm. I decided to pay attention to my unconscious and irrational feelings, hoping that this would help me to find answers to some questions. It turns out that dealing with a situation is harder than making art out of it. So instead of seeing a therapist, I wrote a concept-document of a game about my nightmares. 😃

Psychedelic falling

I made the first prototype of the game for a jam called «Indie Jam». It was a simulation of a dream about a fall. The protagonist named Yuha was exploring a stone plateau with a mysterious rock house above a precipice. Sometimes she would unexpectedly plummet down. The fall resembled a psychedelic experience. The space changed and showed the dreamer its true essence which is a polygonal mesh. The Nightmare could be over by pressing the wake-up button.

Hurried escape

The next step in the game's development was in 2020, when the game took part in the Triennial of Contemporary Art. I made a prototype of one part of the episode «Catastrophe». It was based on a recurring dream I had about a natural disaster or a war that made me urgently pack my belongings and evacuate, but I can't do it as fast as needed. In a way, this dream is a reflection of my reality of recent years, life with a premonition of a disaster and the need to save myself and my loved ones.

This prototype has been upgraded to a demo version, which is available for download on the game's page.

Nightmare feeling

I want to create a nightmare experience not by using horror aesthetics and monsters, but by playing with a degree of player control over gameplay. That's why sometimes it's so hard to move, objects behave strangely, the player unexpectedly teleports somewhere, gets stuck in textures, and everything glitch abruptly. At the same time there is an opportunity to see the level from unexpected angles.

Episode One: Catastrophe

The game will be released episodically. Next year I plan to release the episode «Catastrophe», which is made up of several digital dreams related to catastrophic themes. Now I'm making another «dream» about escaping (again!) and dodging bullets. Read more about it in the following dev diary entries.