I don't even know how to start writing about this game

I’ve been staring at this blank page for ten minutes. Which is funny, because I have approximately 30,000 words of game design documents open in another window. I know exactly what this game is. I just don’t know where to start talking about it.

Maybe I start here: I’ve been interested in game development since I was a kid. I suspect a lot of us are. It’s one of those childhood fixations that either fades into a fond memory or quietly follows you into adulthood, occasionally tapping you on the shoulder at 11 p.m. to show you a new idea it had.

Mine never left.

Over the years I sketched concepts, wrote down half-baked world ideas, and actually built things — small, rough, nobody-will-ever-see-these things. A 2.5D platformer I cobbled together in Blender for no particular reason. A top-down prototype in Unreal Engine where you slashed spiders in a cemetery, which sounds terrible in retrospect but was genuinely fun to make for about two weeks. Different engines, different ideas, different tech stacks. I wasn’t trying to ship anything. I was enjoying the building. It was where I got to be creative in a way that nothing else quite scratched — the combination of logic and imagination that programming a game forces you into.

I’m aware there are thousands of people like me. Indie devs with dreams, notebooks full of concepts, and a prototype folder that will never see daylight. We’re not rare. What I’ve accepted, slowly, is that I’m one of them — and that it’s okay if this takes a very long time.

Six years, roughly, this particular project has been in some form of existence. Not six years of daily work — god, no. Six years of returning to it, letting it breathe, rewriting the lore from scratch when I finally understood what I actually wanted it to be, then setting it down for six months when life had other plans. Somewhere in that period I also tried Unreal and Unity before landing on Godot, tried various art styles before accepting that pixel art is what this story deserves. The decision didn’t feel like a compromise. It felt right.

So I’ll start here, with the honest version: I am a thirty-something dad who can’t draw, refuses to learn music production, and is somehow making a deeply atmospheric, philosophically dark pixel art game inspired by Hindu cosmology, John Milton, and a 2001 PlayStation action game about a vampire who drinks souls to survive.

This is normal. This is fine.

The game has a name

It’s called Papniskin.

I made up the word. It doesn’t mean anything in any language I know of. It felt right for a creature that is itself a made-up thing — a biological mistake, an experiment, an accident of desperation. You’ll understand in a minute.

The elevator pitch goes something like this: you are a hybrid creature — part Ancient Blue Race, part Phylum — who wakes up in a gestation chamber carved into a cliffside. You emerge into the sunlit ruins of a civilization that is already gone. Then you descend underground into the ruins of the other civilization, also gone. You piece together what happened to both of them. You probably don’t like what you find.

There are no heroes in this story. You are not here to save anything. The world already broke itself before you arrived, and your job is to understand how, even as surviving it slowly corrupts you.

Top-down, pixel art, Godot. Somewhere between 4 and 10 hours depending on how deep you go. That’s the whole pitch.

The world that got out of control in my head

This is where it gets complicated, and also where I start to sound slightly unhinged about a game that has spent six years living in my head before landing in a document.

The world of Papniskin has two peoples who lived in balance for millennia on an isolated island. The Ancient Blue Race: graceful, winged, nature-magic wielders, living under the open sky. The Phylum, or The Unspoken: pale, bone-plated, technologically gifted, deeply spiritual, living underground. Different in method. Deeply respectful of each other. Guardians of the Samsara Cycle — the natural wheel of death, purification, and rebirth that kept cosmic order ticking along.

Then an eldritch entity called Xutali showed up.

Xutali is a tentacled, multi-eyed soul-devouring thing that got banished from the material plane by Old Gods and spent thousands of years slowly crawling back toward sources of nourishment. It found the Spectral Realm — the purification plane between death and rebirth — and started feeding, corrupting it from the inside, until its psychic influence finally bled through to the living.

Here’s the elegant, horrible part: Xutali spoke to both peoples differently.

To the Phylum, who could brush the edge of the Spectral Realm in deep meditation, it appeared as what it was — a horrifying parasite. Most of them recoiled. They tried to warn the Blues.

To the Blues, who only heard Xutali in dreams and never saw it clearly, it presented itself as a transcendent liberating force. A god of ascension and oneness. The Blues embraced it completely. They rewrote their entire relationship with death around it. And when the Phylum tried to warn them — described the tentacles, the soul-devouring, the parasite — the Blues interpreted it as heresy and declared holy war.

Neither side wins. The Phylum, facing extinction, engineers a biological weapon: a silent virus that doesn’t kill but sterilizes. Every Blue, forever. The Blues win the war militarily but lose the future. No more children. Ever. Their civilization dies in slow motion across generations, abandoned by the very god they worshipped, sinking into despair and ritual suicide. The Phylum, banished to the Demon Realm, are twisted and maddened by its corrupting energies and return as warped remnants of what they were.

The island falls silent. Almost nothing survives.

Almost.

In the final years, a handful of the last Blue scholars — understanding they are going extinct — begin forbidden experiments. They try to create life. They fail with their own essence. In desperation they turn to Phylum remains, the very people they erased from history, and combine them. The result is the protagonist: a fragile hybrid sealed in stasis when the experimenters themselves finally succumb.

You wake up alone in a dead world you had no part in destroying, carrying the biological inheritance of both its worst impulses. Welcome.

The mechanic that makes it feel like something

Combat is simple on the surface: a three-hit claw combo, a short dash for evasion and positioning, and — if scope allows — elemental powers unlocked by defeating boss guardians: fire, shadow, earth, wind, each one potentially opening new routes and new possibilities. The enemies are varied enough to keep you honest: patrolling creatures that aggro on sight, ranged threats that punish standing still, obstacle-heavy areas that force you to think about spacing. Nothing here is mechanically overwhelming. The game doesn’t want to be a reflex test. It wants every fight to feel tense, deliberate, and slightly costly — because the cost matters.

Some enemies, when they die, release a soul. You can consume it.

In the Material Realm it restores health. In the Spectral Realm — which you slip into when you die, and must slowly fill a Re-Manifest bar to escape — it pulls you back toward life.

But each consumed soul sends whispers through the silence. And each one frays another thread from the Samsara Cycle, the cosmic rebirth wheel you were presumably born to protect, being the last living hybrid heir to the two civilizations who built their entire spiritual existence around it.

Survival is corruption. Every act of staying alive is a small, quiet violation of cosmic order. The deeper you descend, the heavier this gets.

The other side of the game is exploration — and this is where it breathes. The protagonist carries an inner light, a fragile circle of illumination that does more than push back the dark. It reveals hidden passages that are invisible without it. It activates lore fragments — sealed into the walls, the ruins, the remnants of both civilizations — delivering their secrets as whispered audio narration rather than text dumps. The world doesn’t explain itself. It waits for you to find the right angle, the right corner, the right moment of stillness. Secrets are everywhere, and most of them were never meant to be found.

The deeper you go, the harder the light is to hold. Not mechanically — there’s no fuel bar, no countdown. Just atmosphere: the shadows crowd closer at the edges, the glow feels more tenuous, more borrowed. Discovery starts to feel less like triumph and more like trespass.

There are no jump scares. There is no dramatic reveal. The horror is chronic and atmospheric — silence, echoing footsteps, shadows pressing at the edges of your circle of light, fragments of a dead world bleeding through the quiet, the slow accumulation of understanding. You don’t conquer the depths. At best, you understand them. And understanding doesn’t feel like victory.

Where I got this from

Soul Reaver, first and most obviously — the original Legacy of Kain game where you play Raziel, a wraith who devours souls just to keep himself from dissolving. The spectral realm shift, the soul consumption as survival, the moral weight of a parasitic existence, the tragic protagonist who has no good options. Yes, the debt is real, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But where Soul Reaver is about fate and time paradox, Papniskin is about the Samsara Cycle and what it costs to corrupt it. Different philosophy, same influence.

Hyper Light Drifter for the visual language: extreme light and shadow, ruins, silent environmental storytelling, a protagonist whose vitality is visibly fading.

Below (Capybara Games) for the suffocating underground descent with no guidance, the fragile light-source mechanic, the sense that the deep is incomprehensible and doesn’t care about you.

And Paradise Lost — John Milton’s epic — for the thematic structure. The fall from grace. The corrupting pursuit of forbidden knowledge. The bitter truth that full understanding brings no salvation, only heavier sorrow.

Plus, somewhere in the background, the actual Samsara concept from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. The endless wheel. The idea that the cycle of rebirth depends on souls being purified rather than consumed. I didn’t invent the philosophy — I just borrowed it and made it hurt more.

Where I actually am — and where I’m probably going

Here’s the honest version of the development timeline: I have two kids. They came first, they come first now, and they’ll come first for the foreseeable future. There is no version of events where I’m doing this eight hours a day like a proper job. I don’t have the financial runway for that, and even if I did, my family is not a line item I’m willing to cut.

So this goes slowly. Sometimes I don’t open the project for months. Sometimes I come back, find that a new version of Godot has changed something fundamental, and spend a weekend rewriting a system I’d already built. That’s just the shape of it.

But here’s the thing: I actually enjoy that too. Half the time I’m not even building toward the finished game — I’m just solving a problem because it’s interesting. Getting 4-directional movement to feel right. Implementing wall climbing. Getting a 3-combo claw attack to chain properly and feel satisfying. These aren’t chores. They’re the reason I started doing this in the first place. The game is the excuse; the building is the point.

The design document is done now. Six zones mapped out, mechanics specified, full lore written, boss structure planned, demo scope defined. That’s the milestone I’m marking here. Godot is open. The hard part starts — and by hard part I mean both the actual coding and the inevitable moment where I spend three days on a walking animation that ends up looking like someone falling down stairs in slow motion.

None of this is for money, by the way. I never was. If I wanted to make money I’d build something useful, not a 6-hour atmospheric pixel art tragedy about a hybrid creature consuming souls in an underground labyrinth. This is for expression. It’s for the feeling — the one I want to create in the player, and honestly the one I want to have myself when I eventually play a version of this that’s actually finished.

If it ever gets to that point, the whole thing will be open source. Code, assets, documents, all of it. Maybe someone builds on it. Maybe someone learns something from it. Maybe by then it’ll be genuinely obsolete and nobody cares, which is also fine.

Maybe I finish it at 60, when the kids are grown and my joints ache and I finally have uninterrupted evenings again. By then the AI will probably handle the music. Game dev already demands that you learn roughly 15 things simultaneously — engine, code, art, design, physics, shaders, UI, animation — and at some point a person has to draw a line. My line is music production. I’m not saying it’s the hard part. I’m saying it’s the part I’ve simply decided not to start. There are plenty of other problems ahead of it in the queue.

The island is waiting

I know this thing might be terrible. I know that a document, however thorough, is not a game — and that the gap between the two is where most indie projects quietly disappear. I know all of this and I don’t especially care.

It’s mine. That’s the part that matters. The world, the creature, the tragedy of two peoples who destroyed each other over a false god — I built that. Slowly, imperfectly, across six years of stolen hours between work and family and migraines and everything else. It exists now in a way it didn’t before, and I’m going to keep building it until it exists more.

This is the first post I’ve written about Papniskin. There will be more — screenshots when something looks right, a video when something actually moves, devlogs when I break something spectacular and then fix it. But right now I just needed to write this one. The document is done and I wanted to mark that somewhere, get it out of my head and onto a page where it exists outside of me.

I do sometimes daydream about doing this full time — eight uninterrupted hours a day, just building. But then I remember that I also genuinely like my work, that bills are real, and that a life structured around one obsession sounds romantic until you’re living it. I’m not giving anything up by going slow. I’m just doing this the way it fits into an actual life. And honestly? That’s fine. More than fine.

Pixel by pixel. Line of code by line of code.

The island is waiting.