Demonhour
A spookhouse VR project
How did it start?
My first self-made game was Die Flucht, a small point-and-click adventure where I did everything myself – even the backgrounds in Paint. Using photos from my digital camera, linked through Adventure Maker, I learned the basics of programming logic. I tested the game on family members and observed their reactions. This first step laid the foundation for Demonhour in 2013.
Demonhour was initially called Horror Night and took place in my room on Grandma's attic, as well as in the hallway and the adjoining bathroom. Using simple if-then-else formulas, I had made a small spooky fun house out of photos that I had taken at night around Halloween. By clicking on the edges you could pan back and forth between the slides and when you clicked on special areas or doors a random sound played and let the player navigate freely. A bit like Myst - ordered on Wish. Poorly cut out PNG ghost faces from Google search provided the horror and I showed the finished project to a dozen friends.
My audience was particularly pleased with my detailed comments. I plastered all the screens with finely detailed hitboxes, which, when clicked, gave anecdotes, allusions and explanations about my life. A mixture of witty entertainment and voyeuristic curiosity was what drove people. The horror was simple and unintentionally funny, but people liked it as a fun project. Inspired by the James Wan blockbuster Insidious, I renamed the project to Demonhour and took photos of Grandma's entire house.
Upstairs, downstairs, garden - including Grandma herself and expanded the three initial levels to eighteen with several bonus contents. The mini-game was particularly popular, where I imitated Granny's voice and she called out for symbols that you had to find on flying balloons faster and faster.
Sequels
A good six months after the first one, I started working on Demonhour II and immediately got to know the designer's disease. First of all, everything was twice or three times as big. Instead of one house, why not build seven houses like that and a lot of things around it, and in the end, you can't fill any of it. I built a lot of stage and in the end I didn't know what to perform and how to connect them. I spent a year building in vain and then abandoned the whole project. For another good year, nothing happened about Demonhour.
In 2016, I streamed Demonhour with a friend and also showed excerpts from my abandoned second part. All of this motivated me again and I got sick, had weeks at home to create something. This became the real second part - A Demonhour Story. As originally planned, the part began in my current apartment - mainly because I was still working with photos and clicking together a 2D adventure. It was much shorter, but there was more to do and more to discover.
I pushed the software, which hadn't been updated for over ten years and was actually designed for 1024x768 to its limits again and even worked on a patch around Halloween 2017! 3D rendered maps and more content were added. Bugs were fixed and I started to spin the story a little further. The technical framework was still catastrophic and during the Corona period I took the page with the download link offline and only talked about these projects from then on.
Digging into 3D and VR
By 2022, I wanted to reimagine Demonhour and began working on Demonhour 3(D). Using new tools like Unity and Blender, I brought my grandmother’s villa into the third dimension for the first time. I learned how to bake lightmaps, create textures, and build 3D assets efficiently. Slowly but steadily, the project grew with new rooms, sound effects, and even a small soundtrack.
I drew funny caricatures of family members, had textures created for me and did a bit of planning. Planning - I've always been good at that. I was mostly designing, not implementing. I've been designing since I was a child, ever since I walked around with a Chinese notebook.
Whenever I had time, I added a few rooms, objects or sounds to Grandma's villa. I commissioned an artist to design artwork for Demonhour and grabbed musicians and actors for voice lines and a small soundtrack. It took me two weeks to learn how textures work and how to set the mood for a scene with light. How to bake lightmaps and build simple furniture yourself.
Hiatus and publishing a test
I wanted to continue working on Demonhour alone - it was my baby. In 2024, the company I had worked for with great joy over the past few years was ripped apart and that gave me completely different life topics than continuing my hobbies. My work for this company was also the fuel that allowed me to delve deeper into the gaming subject matter and made Demonhour 3 possible!
By the end of 2024, I was trained in Unreal Engine and Blender and was slowly getting interested again. I had uploaded Demonhour 3 to VRChat during the development period so that it could be tested and played continuously. Sometimes I enter that building ground with friends and take notes!
The first thing I did was to optimize it. Building everything without interruption so that every object in the CPU was working at all times was simply not a good idea. So I divided the villa and of course added new areas. My own apartment was implemented again, only this time in 3D! It was to be an homage to Demonhour 2 and A Demonhour Story (from 2016/2017).
Grandma's villa was to be the only real horror villa and I expanded it. The popular mini-game from part one naturally had to be brought back.
First steps in Blender
Using new tools like Unity and Blender, I brought my grandmother’s villa into the third dimension for the first time. It took a good six months before I got to know Unity. Actually, I only learned it so that I could do work on my avatar for VR myself. Friends and artists in the bubbles I was in had become too slow and unreliable for me. But that opened up the opportunity to work on worlds for VR as well. A friend taught me the basics of Blender and in the spooky season of 2022 I started working on Demonhour 3(D)!
Setting up a spooky stage
For a long time spooky effects were limited to sounds and flying cardboard figures. So I worked out more and more content until the beginning of 2024 and learned that 3D is a lot more work than 2D. I suddenly understood why games cost more and more today and the releases are getting longer and longer apart.
Movies like Insidious and games like Layers of Fear inspired me to set up a spooky mansion! But even funny titles like Luigi's Mansion inspired be. It tought me that even in the most grim places a spark of lightness can be the salt your spooky soup needs to take a breath! Construct a safe place - to destroy it afterwards.
Impressions of Demonhour as 2D versions 2013-2017
Above you see the development of Demonhour in their first version (2013), my aborted project Demonhour II (2015) and A Demonhour Story (2016 + 2017).
Concepting
So I sat down and planned what kind of story I wanted to create from start to finish in late 2024. I could take my time because my Blender course would continue for months and in the meantime I could leisurely model objects every now and then. For 2025 there was a plan now!
Up until then, working on Demonhour had been more like randomly adding nice features that popped into my head at any given time. But now I knew how it should start and how it should end. I followed the advice of my bosses at the company where I worked on three different games.
How Demonhour drained into reality
The fact that I picked up Demonhour again was a whim. Even as a child, I liked to draw the ghosts of Luigi's Mansion and pin them to my bedroom wall with thumbtacks. Apparently I never really grew up, because I turned my family into scary paintings and hung them on my wall in 2022.
A friend created classic textures for a spooky mansion and an advertising company printed them on flag fabric as a background. That was the starting point for Demonhour 3 just brought into real life! I started to cobble together rooms in Blender, added these textures and hung the pictures on the wall. I bought a few assets, commissioned more, and later I just crafted more and more myself. That was the beginning - the end will follow~
Tribute to childhood
I spent large parts of my childhood sitting in one of granny's armchairs, playing on my laptop and being creative and also escaped in my role-playing games. Grandma got herself an internet connection so that I had a sanctuary there.
Grandma sat on the left with her yellow press newspapers and watched talk shows on TV and I sat on the right with my laptop and had my headphones on so as not to disturb her. I recreated this scene in the map and it is all a tribute to my childhood. Artists always create a part of themselves with what they show.
Jumping into Virtual Reality
The more I learn to realistically recreate virtual worlds in a game engine, the more immersive the image becomes of what it was like back then. Now and then I have been able to take friends from all over the world with me to this memory, because today the house looks completely different. There is no way to go back there in the real world, but in the Demonhour project this snapshot will always remain. A breath captured forever.
