Who Am I?
Hi I am Nathaniel also known as SENKRAD. I am the owner of SENKRAD Studios and started game development as a college student in the north east of the UK. I have worked on a couple of projects in the past which can be seen and played here:
https://senkrad-studios.itch.io/
I have always been interested in the games industry and have wanted to work in it for quite a long time, since I was a little kid really, which is why I took a game development course at my local college.
Past Projects (All are works in progress)
Erekor's Asteroids:
This was my first project and one which took a short time to develop, using YouTube tutorials as a guide. It didn't get many views but as an Asteroids clone I didn't expect it to do well. I am still working on this game every now and then to give it improvements but none of these is public yet as I am currently attempting to fix the difficulty settings as when all of the large asteroids are destroyed it spawns more of them which it should not do. This only happens on Normal and Hard difficulty. Easy works fine. This was made in Gamemaker Studio: Professional.
[Insert Game Name Here]
This is my second project and one that has taken up the most time out of all of them. This started out as a game that I was working on at home when I first started college as a way to get to know the Gamemaker software a bit better. It is far more advanced than my Asteroids clone and uses far more scripts than it. It is still a work in progress that I am spending a lot of time trying to improve it, currently there is no audio but it will be added soon.
This game is an Isometric 2D game with the main aim of traversing the maze and defeating the monsters which will progressively get harder. This was made using Gamemaker Studio: Professional. The pre-alpha/demo can be played here:
https://senkrad-studios.itch.io/insert-game-name-here
What am I working on Now?
The current project I am working on is called Bittersweet. I am making this game in the Unreal Engine 4. I am using this engine as it is a very good 3D game engine which has a large community, also it is the engine that I am currently being taught to use in College. Within the Unreal Engine 4 there are also many free and paid asset packs that are available for me to potentially use.
I decided upon the name Bittersweet as it is a play on the name of the folklore that the game is based on.
This is how the name was decided:
瞽女 の 幽霊 = ごぜ の ゆれい
Goze no yūrei = Goze no yu rei
Ghost of a Lady = Bittersweet
It is a play on the Japanese name of the folk tale of the same name.
This game is a first-person, psychological horror.
I am using the psychological and horror genres because they
pair well together. Also, I am using the horror genre because it is very popular and
has been for a long time. However the horror genre has been quite stale for a
fair amount of time as well since the constant use of jump scares has diluted
the genre and made it so that players are used to this. This way of scaring the
player doesn’t work well anymore, which is why I have decided to try and mess with thew players head.
This games audience is anyone over the age of 16 that wants to play horror games basically. This is because it contains some sexual content.The
sexual content within my game will not contain full nudity or a full blown sex
scene. Instead it will be left to the players imagination, similar to those in
The Witcher Series and the Dragon Age series
This is the overall story for the game that I plan on producing:
Demo
Horror Story set during the Modern day in Japan. Journalist
(Damien Jackson) investigating a traditional ghost story in which a blind
Japanese woman (Goze) was raped before being thrown off of a cliff and dying.
The story then states that the samurai came to a Buddhist temple a year later
before being dragged into her grave as she was buried there.
The story starts at a run-down abandoned Japanese home
(Night Time). A western journalist looking into eastern ghost stories in order
to find their origins enters with a torch since the story begins at night.
Hearing tradition Japanese singing with a Shamisen in the background
(occasional screech sound) he starts to look around the house. Occasionally
seeing transparent figures of a beautiful woman. Enters bedroom, puddle of water
in middle of room, Damien collapses unconscious, Cutscene (dream) of samurai
and Goze having sex (Similar to DA and Witcher games). Occasional glimpses of
Goze’s actual hideous appearance overlays on her otherwise beautiful (imagined)
figure. Damien wakes up to sunlight glaring in eyes. He sees the spirits of the
samurai and the goze leaving house. The demo ends as the spirit of the samurai
looks back with a sinister look on his face
Demo Ends
Full Game
Walks outside to car, drives to the nearby Buddhist temple.
On the way to the temple, Damien sees the Goze (still in the beautiful imagined
spirit form) get shoved off the cliff by the spirit of the Samurai. A high
pitched scream is heard before a loud thud sound. Upon reaching the temple,
partly in ruins, multiple visions occur. Damien again collapses unconscious.
While unconscious he sees the temple many years in the past. Two of its priest
are seen carrying the body of a woman, the goze, Damien is still seeing her
beautiful imagined form. They bury her corpse with in an unnamed grave as her
name and social status were unknown. This vision bleeds into another, the
samurai arriving at the temple a year later and sleeping on a futon. Damien now
wakes up and the player is in control once again. They can search the temple.
Damien sees the spirit of the goze standing above the samurai. She says “Have
you already forgotten last Autumn? You played with me, and then tossed me away
when you were finished. I have no eyes, but I see you now!” The goze drags
samurai towards the graves site. The player must then search the graveyard for
the grave before digging it up to find two spirits the samurai with the goze
clinging to him. The spirit of the goze then shifts from her beautiful form to
her real form before the spirits fade into two bloodied skeletons.
This is the flooring plan for the Japanese house map:
This is the reference material that I have decided to use for my project:
This story takes place during the Kyoho era (1716-1736).
A samurai named Hotsumi Kanji,a minor prefect in Kitakuni province, was making
his prescribed annual trip to the capital at Edo one year when he stopped at an
inn along the way.
From his room, he heard the most beautiful singing voice
he had ever heard in his life. It was coming from one of the rooms of the inn,
and belonged to a goze, one of the blind women who traveled the country making
their living performing on the shamisen.
Thinking that a voice so beautiful must be attached to an
equally beautiful body, Hotsumi resolved to have the woman. Discovering which
room was hers, he hid in the dark, waiting for her to return. When the goze
returned, Hotsumi sprang from his hiding place and ravished her, an act which
the woman was not opposed to in the least.
The next morning, Hotsumi was shocked to discover that
the woman with the beautiful voice was unspeakably ugly. Her hideous faced
beamed at him with a look of pure joy, thinking that she had at last found
love. But nothing could be further from the truth—Hotsumi quickly concocted a
plan, and took the woman with him on his way to Edo. On a convenient mountain
road, he pushed the ugly blind woman into a ravine, killing her. Thinking he
had solved the problem quite nicely, Hotsumi continued on his business.
The following year, Hotsumi had completely forgotten
about the incident. Again, the time came for his trip to Edo, and this time he
stopped at a small mountain temple to spend the night. That night, the yurei of
the goze appeared before him. She said to him:
“Have you already forgotten last Autumn? You played with
me, and then tossed me away when you were finished. I have no eyes, but I see
you now!”
She grabbed Hotsumi by his ankles and tore him from his
bed. He struggled to break away from her, but his strength was nothing compared
to her rage-fueled power. Hotsumi saw himself being dragged to the temple’s
graveyard. The goze stopped before a certain grave, smiled slightly, then
embraced Hotsumi and drove him into the earth with one strong pull.
The monks of the temple heard the commotion and ran to
see what the matter was. They followed the trail to the graveyard, and after
retrieving shovels they dug quickly into the earth. They soon found Hotsumi’s
body, with the skeleton of a woman wrapped around it. By fate or bad luck
Hotsumi had chosen the temple where the goze’s body was buried after it had been
discovered down in the ravine. And she had come to claim him.
Translator’s Note:
At last, a blood-thirsty tale of ghostly revenge for
Halloween! This is one of those stories that pops up in several Edo-period
kaidan collections, in a few variations. I created a kind of mix of the
different versions, taking the pieces I like and assembling them together into
a single story. For example, Mizuki Shigeru’s version in the Mujyara doesn’t
have Hotsumi being drug into the grave, but just disappearing from the hotel.
But I really like the grave bits so I left that in.
The title of the story is 瞽女の幽霊 (Goze no Yurei). “瞽女” (Goze) is one of those weirdly
specific Edo period words that refers to a blind woman who played the shamisen
and worked as an itinerant entertainer. If you were a blind woman in the Edo
period, there were only a few jobs available to you, and goze was one of them.
Either that or masseuse/assassin, or so the movies tell me.
Mizuki Shigeru’s art uses Utagawa Hideyoshi’s 瞽女の幽霊 (Goze no Yurei) as an
inspiration. I don’t know if
Hideyoshi was painting exactly this story, or just a painting of the “stock character” of a goze’s ghost. Mizuki Shigeru certainly elaborated on the scenery
when creating his version—Hideyoshi’s is on a simple background, with the yurei
walking in water.
In Japanese folklore, water has always been a pathway to
the world of the dead. During the Obon Festival of the Dead yurei zoom across
Japan’s rivers like a super expressway, coming home to meet their families then
being sent back with lanterns floating out to sea. So Hideyoshi’s picture is
more metaphysical than representational. The water is the world of the dead,
not an actual river being crossed by the yurei.
I have come up with a list of Assets that I plan on working on:
Audio:
Traditional shamisen with female voice actor singing
Dripping water sounds throughout game (Water is associated as
a path to the land of the dead in Japan)
Cutscenes:
Opening cinematic in which protagonist talks about how he is
working on researching folk tales from eastern (Asian) countries and how he is
currently looking into the Japanese folk tale called goze no yurei. During this
it shows pictures from various Asian folktales finally showing a female spirit
upon a pool of water.
Demo: ending cinematic showing the two spirits leaving the
house, the samurai looks back with a sinister look on his face.
Characters:
Damien Jackson
Two Japanese Woman, 1 Beautiful, 1 Hideous.
A Samurai armoured and unarmoured
Male bloodied skeleton
Female bloodied skeleton
Environment:
Traditional Japanese House Outside view
Traditional Japanese House Inside View
Futon
Rotten Futon
Plant Pots
Vases
Broken Vases
Bricks
Cracked Bricked
Broken Bricks
Wooden Planks
Broken Wooden Planks
Sliding Doors
Broken Sliding Doors
Animal Bones (Chicken, Macaque, Brown Bear, Japanese Hare,
Japanese Serow, Japanese Quail, Inari Foxes, Whale, Fugu)
Half Chewed Animal Bones
(^^^^^^^^^)
Interactive Items:
Torch
Batteries maybe?
Thanks for Reading
Nathaniel Smith
SENKRAD Studios
