The Consuming Shadow

Producer

Produced Yahtzee Croshaw's first commercial game, a Lovecraftian procedural horror. Very Positive on Steam, with one shot to get it right.

Producer on The Consuming Shadow, the first commercial game by Yahtzee Croshaw¹², the critic behind Zero Punctuation.

Between Halfbrick and Storm8 I deliberately changed scale: from billion-download live services, where telemetry and constant iteration are the whole job, to indie, where you get one shot, a tiny team, and a marketplace that behaves nothing like the App Store.

Some free-to-play instincts carried over. Several actively worked against the game. Sorting one from the other was the real work, and it became a GDC talk³⁴.[cite:consuming-shadow]

The game itself ran on the procedural systems I cared about in R&D: investigation, sanity, and an unknowable threat recombined every run, so the dread was generated rather than scripted. It shipped to a Very Positive rating from players on Steam⁵.[cite:consuming-shadow-steam]

Scale teaches you systems. A small game teaches you that none of the systems matter unless the thing itself is good.

Sources

1. Steam
2. MobyGames, career credits
3. From Free-to-Play to Indie
4. GDC talk, 2016 (GDC Vault)
5. Steam

Gallery

• The loop: a countdown, a sanity meter, and a country to investigate before the ritual completes.
• Every run recombines the map, the suspects, and the threat, so the investigation never plays the same twice.
• Every lead ends at a trigger pull. Guess the cultist wrong and your own sanity pays for it.
• The dread is generated by the systems, not scripted: procedural design doing horror's work.
• Key art. Very Positive from players on Steam.

Links

• My GDC slide deck: Walking a Mile in an Indie's Shoes (PDF)
• The Consuming Shadow on Steam
• My GDC talk on what carried over, and what did not