The kind of horror I like

Ever since I was old enough to watch movies, I have been a fan of horror. I notice the small, carefully placed details, and I am the person who will happily point them out in the middle of a movie at the cinema. What I love most is the way some films become unpredictable without relying on a constant stream of shocks. Midsommar, Insidious 1, Hereditary, and Lake Mungo all do that in different ways. They create a feeling that something is wrong, then keep changing what you think that feeling means. That kind of horror has always stayed with me.

The actual starting point for Descent was much less serious. A reel kept showing up on my feed called "average cave diving enjoyer," and that meme is genuinely where the idea began. I had played a lot of horror games by then, so I decided to try making one of my own, built around the kind of uncertainty I enjoy watching on screen.

Descent is short, about fifteen to twenty minutes, but I wanted that small amount of time to feel tense. There's no monster chasing you. Or is there? The fear is quieter than a direct pursuit. It comes from the dark, the tight spaces, and the feeling that you do not know what is down there with you. You spend the whole game trying to climb out of the cave, which is the part I like most. It is called Descent, but the descent is not the direction you are moving. That is all I will say about it.

Making it anyway

I built Descent solo over three or four months while learning C# from YouTube one problem at a time. The code is mine and it is a little rough, and a few bugs made it into the final build, but it runs and I shipped it under the name Luzxe on itch.io. The 3D assets are free assets that I credited in the game because I had not learned Blender yet. What I am actually proud of is the main mechanic and the lore holding it together, and I am keeping both of those details to myself for now.

The part I bring up most often is the machine I made it on. My old laptop could barely run Unity and kept freezing, so I saved up for more RAM and upgraded it from 4GB to 8GB just so the editor would open without choking. Then I kept going. Half of why I am proud of Descent is that it exists at all, especially considering the hardware it came from.

A first game is never completely solo

Descent is the project where working alone clicked for me, and it has become part of how I like to build. Even so, a first game is never completely solo. My girlfriend gave me the most feedback and kept me motivated throughout the process, while Bryan Pascual and Earl Daniele Calera playtested the game and told me what was broken. I owe all of them for helping me get it across the finish line.