Postmortem: First-job survival-horror Yuppie Psycho

gamedeveloper.com:

We are Baroque Decay, a small video game developer with members from Spain, France and the United States. Let us tell you the story ofYuppie Psycho.

Most of us didn't come from studying specifically for this: we came from film school and doing horror short films between us. We are regular gamers. Until some first shy attempts in the mobile game market in 2012, the idea of taking this as our new job didn't seem possible.

Our first project was... a complete failure. Two years of work and the game had hardly anything to show. And yet, a single trailer for that project had already been seen by more people than any of our more expensive and laborious-to-make short films.

So we had to step up. The idea was no longer whether we could pull off our dream game. The idea was whether we could bring at least one complete game to market.

Instead of designing a game and creating the mechanics later, we took the mechanics that worked in our previous project and set ourselves the constraints of working only with them. This meant making a much shorter game, narratively less ambitious, and with very limited gameplay. Therefore, [it would be] a short and simple story, like a fairy tale, and less action, centering on a protagonist who had to hide away from danger, like a stealth and survival game. The outcome was The Count Lucanor. It’s a neat small game. You should try it. But we aren’t talking about it today.

We’re talking about the game that came after: the unique first-job-survival-horror Yuppie Psycho.

The best thing about the release of our first commercial game was learning from the experience, something that lifted the veil and challenged our preconceptions. When it came time to tackle our next work, we hoped not only to produce something