Throwback Sunday - The White Chamber (Patreon)

Good day, all!

I found this on my hard drive and thought I'd share it. Some of you might already know, but my first foray into animation was back in 2005 for a point-and-click indie horror game called The White Chamber. Here's somebody playing it!

https://youtu.be/KaDUZljPjIY

You can still download the game for free from the now ancient website: http://www.studiotrophis.com/site/downloads

As you can see, I couldn't really draw or animate at the time, but I did all the artwork, Rich Perrin programmed it and Zak Rahman did the music. Together we were Studio Trophis and had grand dreams for making games in the future, though this turned out to be our only one due to people just sort of drifting away after university. The game was made in what time we could spare whilst we were all at uni, and there were many nights of sleepless crunch time. Spooky synth noises constantly floated out from Zak's room as he composed the music, and we built up a folder of disgusting medical autopsy photos for reference so I could learn how to draw guts(!).  At one point we were staying up through the night burning hundreds of CDs by hand to give them away at an anime convention the following morning, and I think I fell asleep on the floor..? I'm not sure.
The indie scene was small at the time and the game didn't make much impact. Then shortly after the team split up indie gaming suddenly became huge! Our timing was just a bit off...

Anyway, a couple of years ago Rich wanted to do an HD remaster with updated graphics, and although it never happened in the end, I did get some stuff drawn for it. All the rooms had to have extra art added to both sides to bring them into 16:9 widescreen format (the original game is old TV size). Here's some of them - 

I kept the original room art (redrawing the art completely would mean re-coding object placements and the like) and just added extra to the sides, which means they still look pretty horrible (look at the bad perspective and those dodgy photos used as textures!).

The main character got an update from her frankly laughable babby's first how-to-draw animu look that she originally had, to something a bit more aesthetically acceptable:

The guy on the video discs also got a redraw, thankfully:

Opening and ending movies were redone too. I've included a couple of the newer ones below, plus a .psd so you can see how my parallax scrolling worked.

Anyway, that's about it for that trip down memory lane! In a slightly different reality, Studio Trophis could have been the big name indie dev with a string of hits and I'd be driving a fancy car instead of failing my test 3 times and giving up.
Hope you're all having a good weekend, and stay tuned for a big animation dump near the end of the month, where I'll reveal why I've been mysteriously quiet the past month and a half!
I may not have been destined to be a famous indie game artist, but thanks to you lot I might just make it as an indie animator all these years later. Let's get something into a film festival!

-Paul