The Floor Above is a trial run for us in a sense. Although we all have been working on different projects for quite a long time, this was our first attempt at making something this focused, this narrow in mechanics, but this loaded in atmosphere. So, we encountered many difficulties during our first weeks of development. But they made us smarter and allowed us to create something really exciting.
The floor is Maksym’s, he’s our lead game designer:
Before we opened the engine and placed the first chair, the room existed “on paper” for about a month. That month was basically me walking around with the story in my head: who Mike is, how he ended up in this place, who else “lives” in the room and why, why there are “announcers” (or “voices”) and what role they play in the logic of the world. At some point the story stopped being something I was writing and became something that was talking back to me.
That’s exactly how Morty the cat appeared. He wasn’t in the initial script. One day he just… showed up in the story and refused to leave. As cats usually do. And in the full version of the game his role will be noticeably bigger — he is not a background meme character, he belongs to the world.
If we’re being honest — the final room is surprisingly close to the earliest prototype. First we built a general visual: proportions, the main vantage points, what the player sees most of the time. On the second iteration we made the space a little wider and friendlier to camera work. And then, update by update, we started feeding it objects: some purely atmospheric, some supporting upcoming events, some teasing the larger story.
Because nearly the whole game happens in a single space, every object in that space matters. Some things are narrative anchors, some are mood anchors, some are just quiet jokes and references for the people who follow us.
There is a painting in the room with one of the game’s characters on it. Guessing who that is from the demo alone is hard — but it becomes obvious if you follow our TikTok or play the full version.
The ram’s head on the wall was born out of a reference to Evil Dead 2
The fireplace exists to make the room less hostile. It’s a visual anchor of safety, a thing the eye can rest on. The TV is the opposite of that. Its hiss and interruptions are there to push the player back into tension.
The lighting is deliberately uneven: somewhere it’s warm, somewhere it’s cold, somewhere it’s just dark. It’s to keep a single-room experience from feeling flat.
Because it’s unusual and interesting.
We wanted to try a horror scenario where the player can’t do a thing with the position they are in. Mike is literally strapped to a chair. He hears things, sees things, he understands that something is inside the room with him. But he can’t kill it or hide from it. That forced helplessness felt fresh to us.
The “loop” in the game is, by the way, not necessarily a loop. Mike in the chair and Mike at the microphone are not the same Mike. And if the person is not the same — then maybe time isn’t the same either. Full version players will have a clearer picture, but for now we wanted to plant that doubt: what if this is not a perfect circle but a slightly broken one?
Of course we cut stuff.
“Boring anomalies.” We had quite a few of them — disappearing paintings, tiny object swaps, counting how many flowers were in the vase. On paper it made sense, but in practice it’s just not fun to scan walls for the third time. So we left only a minimal amount of such anomalies to avoid oversimplifying the experience, but most of them went away.
Horror references. We had more direct nods to films (for example to the Japanese Ju-On / The Grudge), but some of those we removed because we didn’t want any copyright issues.
Mike and Cassandra are connected. In fact, they’re not the only ones connected — there are more people in this world, and each of them got into a situation they did not expect. For some, it will end badly, for some… strangely, for some — redemptively. Right now all of them live only in our heads, so we can’t show them to you yet, but the plan is to tell this story fully, piece by piece, across several projects. The Floor Above is just the opening door.
So that’s how it happened: the game kind of wrote itself first, and only then we started prototyping it. I was “playing” The Floor Above in my head long before we had the first greybox. And, funnily enough, the same thing is happening now with our new game — the story is already growing, characters are already arguing with me, so it’s just a matter of time before we start telling it publicly.
— Maksym Neizhmak, lead game designer
We will reveal our plans for the future of The Floor Above in the next DevLog. Stay tuned and do not close your eyes for too long!