[Discontinued]

A PSYCHOLOGICAL COMING-OF-AGE HORROR

Pretty, kind, devout, and at the top of her class, Carmara Maheras has everything a teenage girl could ever want: money, a big house, a loving family, a devoted fiancé who spoils her, and an unbreakable bond with her two best friends!

And yet… the past comes back to haunt her throughout her final year of high school. Not to mention a mysterious stalker named Ferrum has intruded upon her life, and has quite a lot to say about it. Carmara feels as if God is testing her when she suddenly faces constant misfortune and betrayal, and she may just do something that can’t be forgiven…

Origins

The origins of Personal Demons was from making a joke demo that eventually became a real one. I’ve taken it offline for personal reasons, but here is some proof of its existence.

Artwork

Art shown is only my contributions.

Illustrations
Concept Art
Sketches
WIPs
Funny Stuff

“For the love of God” AMV

I was making an AMV for the game not as promotional material but just for fun. Not sponsored nor endorsed by MSI, nor was going to be monetized, of course.

Carmaradansen (hidden video)

At some point in the game, there was going to be a link to an unlisted video of a Caramelldansen parody that you could find as an email attachment since back then videos were sent as attachments (YouTube wasn’t invented until much later!).

Design

GUI
Assets
Environment
Characters

The “vibe” of Personal Demons was going to be a collage-type style interface with unorthodox (no pun intended) handmade GUI elements similar to DVD menus and websites from the 2000s. The game itself was set in mid-2000s, but was not trying to be a period piece by any means. The handwritten text on the main menu was based on a font called “Bad Script“, which is meant to be Carmara’s handwriting.

The main menu of the game. The song was found on Archive.org from “Ελληνικοί Χοροί – Greek Dances” and is a cover version of “Ένα Γράμμα Στο Κατώφλι (A Letter on the Doorstep)” by Εύας Στυλ. The song was chosen to give off Silent Hill 1, and later on because the lyrics fit well with the underlying plot.

The loading screen. Rather than making it a video, it was coded in Ren’Py with long pauses so that it looked more like a stop-motion animation. It was originally animated in Clip Studio, but each frame was exported as a single image since Ren’Py doesn’t support GIF format for animations.

The game menu. All of the images were handmade and handwritten. It was meant to be simple but also unique.

The Eyes of Saints

Many of the assets planned for the game were going to be done in an Orthodox Byzantine art style, with no specific style from the Byzantines in mind, just the “feel” of them. One of the assets planned to be used constantly is sets of eye portraits of saints covering the faces of people, intertwining Carmara’s religious anxiety with plain old regular social anxiety.