Suffocated with iron lung

On December 20^th 2022 I shared some more work on the game with undisclosed Discord server, as I usually do as to show my progress on the game to the unspecified amount of people that would care for it. Soon after I posted the video (which is actually available in the document set titled “Early showcase of main menu, intro cutscene and interaction system”) I got a notification wit ha reply. Something most interesting, since I usually don’t gather any attention with my development showcases.

The message said “you going for an iron lung type of vibe?”, which was a bit irritating, as I have only heard about that game up until that point, but it did spike my interest and so, I went to Google to learn what the Iron Lung is and how is it similar to my game. Turns out, it was greatly similar to my game. Offputtingly similar. So similar in fact, that if anyone was to look at my game, they’d think it’s just a cheap knock-off of Iron Lung. That, as you might imagine, was a problem for my game, as I could  not create a knock-off of a game I have never played before, but an average customer would not know that, but that was only if the customer was aware of both games, right? It wouldn’t be a problem if the customer hasn’t played Iron Lung before.

Fortunately David Szymanski (The author of Iron Lung) was only the author of DUSK, a game that was a major player in reviving “boomer shooter” game genre and one of the best selling titles of New Blood Interactive and the author of Squirrel stapler one of the best surreal horror experiences I’ve had, amongst other Dread X horror titles, and Gloomwood an upcoming (as of writing this) game which already gets excellent results for graphics, gameplay and innovation, which meant that everybody and their mother would immediately see Iron Lung in my game.

The gameplay was also a major step up from what I’ve made, truly emboldening of what underwater horror is for me: An unescapable situation in hostile environment in which you are disadvantaged against unseen horrors. After playing Iron Lung I can positively say that it was both an amazing game and experience with well crafted gameplay and cleverly designed visuals, which is absolutely horrible news to me, since my game is anything but. Not only it wasn’t very good to begin with, it has also been made already in much better way by someone else.

This devastated me at the time. I started developing Dark Depths, because no one else would. At the time, another person in the Discord server was looking for an Unreal Engine 5 project to use in portfolio and needed ideas for theme. “Underwater” was my suggestion, as  I believed (and still do) that underwater horror isn’t as popular as it deserves to be, but that person didn’t had any underwater related assets, so opted out for greatly blasé “scary haunted house” theme. I always believed in the motto of “be the change you want to see in the world”. I hope you can guess how the rest of the game’s concept came to be, but existence of Iron Lung threw all of that out the window. A game perfectly fitting the underwater horror genre with addition of existential dread and cosmic horror, perfected visuals and years of experience from the developer. That’s about the best a game can be until the programing community manages to pack a blowjob into a zip folder and yet here I was a month into a project with the exact same premise and only a fraction of quality that Iron Lung had.

I felt ruined. What was I supposed to do? Throw away over a month of work? Just releasee all the assets in public domain and hope I can make something better some other time? Try to re-invent the game? Change the plot, setting and premise? Try to play in into the Iron Lung as an inspiration or deny any connections? I’m not sure whether the choice I made in the end was the right one.

The project felt dead. On top of how competitive the gaming market is already, on top of how demanding an average player is, on top of how inexperienced I am with the new engine, the game I worked on is just a copy cat in an eye of an average player. At that moment, it felt like my entire existence as game developer was meaningless. How can I truly start a new project, worrying about marketing, designing, branding et cetera while also having the thought in the back of my mind that the game I’m making is already made? How will I even showcase the game on it’s page? Assuming it’s not gonna simply get drowned in the sea of other questionable-quality titles.

Let’s take a moment to count all the similarities between Iron Lung and Dark Depths, just to drive the point home about how similar the 2 games are.

A person is locked alone on an old, rusty submarine, which they don’t know how to use, owned by the government and repurposed from its original purpose are sent down to the unknown depths to take notes on fauna and flora they find for the sake of science. Both people end up discovering unknown creatures, hiding from their sight and vaguely interacting with them throughout their mission. Both people are expecting to be freed after this assignment (Convict from Iron Lung being promised freedom from imprisonment and researcher expecting to surface after just 2 days from the game’s start), both's fate remains a mystery.

I hope you can also see the similarities in visuals on your own, the major difference being, that mine are amateurish and ugly.

As mentioned, I did end up playing Iron Lung. I also ended up enjoying it greatly., but that enjoyment came at a cost of my own self esteem and my game’s potential future. How could I truly keep on making Dark Depths knowing, that it overshadowed by Iron Lung in every aspect imaginable? How could I release this game knowing well, that it has already been released? The answer is: I could not and thus, the project stalled.

The progress became passive. Only random props and textures were being worked on, and yet progress was made. I cannot explain why, but at no point I didn’t want to work on the game. I continued development, very slowly at first, but then the speed went back up to normal like nothing ever happened. I cannot explain why I pushed on. I cannot tell what my motivation was other than simple passion for making games. I knew that my game will probably not get much attention, I knew that it’s gonna get criticized for a lot of things, even disregarding the possible plagiarism accusations the game still suffers in things like model quality or gameplay intensity, and yet I happily moved on. I can’t even say I’m not worried about it, but somehow it feels irrelevant.

As of writing this paragraph, I finished about half of the game. Despite everything, I feel much more optimistic about the game's development. Even though I did not take any steps towards fixing the issue, it still seems distant. I don’t know what it says about me, that I simply disregarded an issue which almost caused me to stop developing the whole game once and soon the game will be released for people to (hopefully) enjoy.