It began with a question

This log has been about the game so far — the glance, the silhouette, the rooms. This entry is about the two people making it: a father and his daughter. The game began as part of her recovery, and from today we’re telling that story with the doors open.

Her name is Sara

Until now we’ve only ever written “his daughter.” That was her call to make, not ours, so we waited. She’s ready — name, face, the lot. So: this is Sara. She named this game before either of us understood what she had named, and she has been its first and final judge ever since.

The short version of how we got here: early this year her heart stopped, and the resuscitation came late. She survived — she is home, she is herself — but she came back with a brain injury, and the thing it took most of is initiative: the small spark that proposes things, that decides. So we build doorways for that spark. Small, real projects that ask her brain to reach. One of them is this game.

The question

It started at the kitchen table, on an ordinary evening. Shall we make a game together? Sure. What should it be about? Escaping, she said. Escaping what?

That answer is the title, the design brief, and the reason this game exists, all in one word. The full conversation — and everything around it — is now public on the story page. It’s the piece of this project we’re proudest of, and it was never going to stay behind a closed door forever. Read the real story →

She doesn’t do this alone, and neither do I. Her brother and sister are in it with us — playtesters, sounding boards, the people who keep the kitchen table loud.

What’s real and what isn’t

One thing we want to keep very straight, today more than ever: the game’s story — its rooms, its silence, the small figure that keeps pace in the dark — is fiction. It was written to stand on its own, and it goes places our story doesn’t go. Please don’t read the game as our biography, and please don’t mine this entry for answers to what is behind you? — they aren’t here. What’s real is the making: her choices, my build, the open log you’re reading.

Why tell it now

Because if we ever ask you to put money behind this work, we want you to know exactly what you’d be backing first. Not a rescue — we solve our own puzzles; that’s rather the family style. What backers would support is the work: the hours of building, and the care that buys the calm in which the building happens. In return you’d get the game — a real one, made properly, headed for the App Store — and the whole story of how it was made, wrong turns included. For now the ask is simpler, and it’s free: follow the build. Either way, that trade only works if you know who “we” is. Now you do.

Next entry, back to the dark: sound, and how it tells you how close something is without a single word.