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 Croshaw, 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 talk.[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 Steam.[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.
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.