Ahoy, seadogs!
We’ve been thinking and we realized that we’ve been talking to you for a while now, you read our devlogs, you comment, you check out the Terror: Endless Night demo available until the end of the week, you add our game to your wishlists (thank you so much, by the way!) and you don’t even know who WE are. Of course, you know we’re the people running this ship and delivering Terror to you, pardon the pun, but you don’t really know us. So, the time has come for you to meet the crew.
Unseen Silence started off as a project of three friends, brought together by a genuine passion for games cultivated for years. Well, that, and the fact that two of them are brothers. Our tireless trio, Piotr Kurkowski, Krzysztof Szymański, and Ignacy Kurkowski, have spent countless hours discussing other people’s games to death, taking them apart, and looking at each part under a metaphorical microscope.
Us and Krzysztof go way back, we have known him since high school. You could definitely say that we’re consumers of pop-culture, but aside from absorbing it like sponges, we were also able to, and enjoyed to, analyze it, look at it with a critical eye.
- Ignacy Kurkowski, CEO of Unseen Silence
Another one of our boys’ passions is live music, and it’s actually after one of the shows they went to in 2019 (though at this point it’s hard to tell whether it was Muse or Alice in Chains) that the idea of making their own game has first come up. Initially, the plan was to make a fighting game, something like “Mortal Kombat” or “Street Fighter” that would conquer the market with an original artstyle but the idea did not survive a confrontation with our soon-acquired industry knowledge.
We did not want to make every young game dev’s mistake and take on an impossible task and then bounce off game-making when it doesn’t work out. We’re realists and there was simply no way we would’ve been able to create a fighting game at that moment in time.
- Piotr Kurkowski, the lead game designer, who had a different idea for their first project
Piotr had just finished reading “The Terror” by Dan Simmons and it left quite an impression on him. So much so, that it got him thinking, and he soon realized how much potential there is in setting a story on a ship trapped in arctic ice. He floated the idea during one of the meetings with Ignacy and Krzysztof and, unlike its inspiration, it was not put on ice, because they loved it. Soon after, during another meetup, the boys figured out the basics - the game was to be a turn-based strategy game, have difficult moral choices, an ever present sense of danger and limited resources. They also made their minds up in regards to the main enemy - the monster that lurks in every human’s soul. Now they had all the ingredients that would soon make up the essence of “Terror: Endless Night”.
The main challenge was wrapping it all in a compelling horror narrative. We decided on a story driven game, where the plot takes the center stage so the script needed to have a lot of “meat” to hold the player’s attention. Today, I can confidently say that we have succeeded in that goal.
- Krzysztof Szymański, story director at Unseen Silence
The following months were filled with intense design work, and tons of “playtesting” the not-yet-existing game in Excel sheets. The crew also temporarily grew one mate bigger when the boys enlisted the help of a visual artist Sewer Hrehorowicz to create concept art for the game. After writing down all the fundamentals of the game and many revisions to make sure the final version is absolutely bulletproof, our crew put together a presentation and were ready to show it to publishers. The response was outstanding.
Thanks to all the hard work in this early preparation stage we had no problems with getting people interested in our project and securing the funding. All that was left was to put together a team and get the full-scale production started.
- Ignacy Kurkowski, who took charge of the newly-launched company Unseen Silence in July 2020
Naturally, the first new addition was Sewer Hrehorowicz along with his studio, “CVLT”. With his impressive artistic skills and familiarity with the project he was a perfect fit and was soon put in charge of all things graphic design. The programming side of things was entrusted to Artur Dębowski, who was to lead a team of two other code experts - Piotr Spychała and Emil Dębkowski. Finally, on board came Aleksandra Godek to tie everything together as a producer, and this ship was ready to sail.
That’s it for this devlog. All that’s left to say now is that we really want to connect with our fans, so make sure to leave a comment and say hi! If you have any questions, you can also drop them in the comment section, and of course, we encourage you to tap the Wishlist button, because it lets us know that even if you’re a lurker, you’re here and you’re interested in what we have to show. Also, we want to post these regularly so stay on the lookout for more devlogs, and check out the Terror: Endless Night demo, seadogs!
Fair winds,
Unseen Silence
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1878730/Terror_Endless_Night/