Video Horror Society, or VHS, is an asymmetrical 4v1 multiplayer action game where four teens in the roles of stereotypical high school tropes craft weapons to fight and banish a monster straight out of an 80's horror movie! Jocks, cheerleaders and nerds fight a bloodthirsty werewolf in the high school at midnight. You get the picture.
I loved working on this project. I'm not typically a fan of this theme or genre, but the game was fun, the Hellbent Games team was great, and this has been my favorite project to date by far. I enjoyed joining as a green programmer and quickly building my skills to eventually lead my own mini department. I was happy to take on tons of responsibility in my areas of expertise. I learned so much. I have many fond memories of working on this project.
However, the project was not commercially successful. There are many factors that contributed to this, and I believe I know most of them. If you're looking to make an asymmetrical multiplayer game in the 4v1 style, or something similar, I implore you to reach out to me and get my thoughts before you start development so you can avoid some of the mistakes we made. Perhaps someday I'll share my thoughts on this publicly in a proper post-mortem report, but not for the foreseeable future. For now, I don't want to do a deep dive, I just want to bring some closure to the project.
If you'd like to read a more in-depth discussion about his project, follow these links:
I've since left Hellbent Games and have moved on to co-found a new company called Riverwind Studios where some friends and I will be working on new projects. I'll eventually post an update about that here, but if you'd like more up-to-date news on that you should follow Riverwind on the socials by following that link.
Thanks for Reading,
Ross