19th-Century London. A young orphan wakes to a nightmare with no memory of how she got here. A growl echoes through the darkness, sending chills down the spine. Someone… something is watching. The orphan must escape, lest she be lost in the dark forever.
Lost in the Dark is a third-person exploration game with horror elements set during an epidemic in Victorian-era London. Players play as a young orphan trapped in her own psyche who must find a way to escape from a nefarious entity seeking to drag her into the depths of the darkness. Players are equipped with a lantern as their sole means of protection, and must stay in the light to avoid fading away.
The team latched onto the concept of “vulnerability in a nightmare” and its latent potential to impact players in an emotional, visceral manner extending beyond simple mechanical fun. Over five months (from July 2017 to December 2017), Sleepless Dreamer Studioses worked to bring Lost in the Dark from the initial concept all the way through to a shippable RTM build. The team learned that developing with a strong thematic concept in mind leads to many possibilities, and that is important to commit to a single focused direction as early as possible to maintain the overall vision and keep the whole team moving with a strong iterative process. They also learned that having a healthy team culture improves productivity, encouraging individual accountability and maintaining morale when things are not going our way.