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Hello once more! I have released a new game—it’s called Apparatus: Exanimus. I’ll write a little about that here, as well as the showcase it was in, and then give other general development updates.

Apparatus: Exanimus #

Apparatus: Exanimus is a walking simulator/exploration game with horror elements, aesthetically imitating (and explicitly pretending to be) a lost game developed in 1998 by a company long out of business.

I wanted to make something vague, cryptic, and clunky to play. I wanted to present a narrative to the player, as well as a few other gameplay elements, in a way that would require a bit of piecing things together.

To this end, I also made fake packaging for the game, a fake unboxing video, filmed various bits of ‘demonstration’ gameplay through a CRT, and there is also a fake website for the company that made the game. I also made the itch.io page a fake forum thread detailing someone finding the game as lost media.

Here is a rapid-fire list of things it was inspired by:

• Lost media and the communities that form and grow around it
• Memories of PC games and fan communities from the 2000s
• LSD: Dream Emulator (what were you expecting?)
• Marble Hornets
• Petscop

I think if people seem to enjoy it, I may package it up into a Steam build for a couple of bucks in the future. It was all made in just over 1 month for a game jam with some friends.

Which brings us to:

Shovel Direct Showcase #

The Shovel Direct showcase sprouted from the aforementioned game jam as a way of showing off everyone’s hard work. I can highly recommend checking out the other games in the showcase as there are some amazing experiences there. It’s crazy how good some of these are.

I wasn’t involved with the general organisation or production of the showcase, but I did help out with the website a little bit. It seemed to go pretty well and generate a bit of buzz in various spaces—it was nice to see everyone coming together. I’m looking forward to watching some streamers etc. checking it out, if any happen to.

General updates #

I took a month out to work on Apparatus: Exanimus. Before that, I had been making slow-but-steady progress on bringing The Charity Shop to Steam. I’m running a little later than expected (initial estimate Q2 2025), and I think I will probably be launching in October or so at this point. We’ll see! Life gets in the way…

And after that? It’s back to Vignettes: The Dream City— I’m very excited to show off the new ideas for that.

And that is that, thank you for reading and supporting if you are here. It’s much appreciated!

See you next time.