Hey everyone! 👋

We’re Shhhstudios, a small indie team made up of university students from theSAE institute, working across Glasgow and Leamington Spa on our game Shades of Crimson which is our end-of-year project — a game we’ve poured our creativity, caffeine, and countless late-night Discord calls into.

This dev log marks the beginning of our documentation of the development process from early concepts and design choices to technical challenges and visual progress. The goal is to give you an inside look on how we’re bringing Shades of Crimson to life, and maybe even share a few tips and tricks we've found along the way.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be posting updates on everything from art and animation to level design, sound, and gameplay mechanics. We can't wait to show you our progress and get feedback on our work.

— The ShhhStudios Team 🎮

ARTISTS:

Tom

I am pleased with the progress I have made in this first week of production. Throughout pre-production I produced a series of concepts before finalising an orthographic for the Knight class. Since then I have begun low-poly modelling the base mesh and basic clothing forms in ZBrush. I am optimistic that these basic shapes will allow me to produce some appealing high poly clothing forms, armour pieces and a realistic head sculpt that will be consistent with the game assets.

Tim - 4/10/25 - 17/10/25 created multiple design concepts for the boss character.  I had originally designed the boss to have a built body shape with more skin exposed. Then this was changed to have more armour and smaller body shape. The armour has changed a number of times due to research into clipping and overlapping. So the armour design has been better adapted to suite movement and to create less issues down the line. Also taking into consideration the timeframe we have.  

Saffron - Very sick right now

Emmy - MIA

Gannon - 4/10/2025 - 16/10/2025 [Designed and iterated on concept art, created multiple head designs and experimented with different body shapes and armor. Decided to remove the original 4 wings in order to fit within the time limit.] 17/10/2025 - 23/10/2025 [Began sculpting, since I am using the high to low workflow, My goal was to get the base muscle and design, which I am now retopologizing to get the base mesh.]

Nathan -  MIA

DESIGNERS:

Jack - 6/10/2025 - 17/10/2025 [I drew a few layout sketches of the level 2 map on both Draw.io as well as in my notepad. I received feedback from my fellow team-mates who said it was too short, and so I’ve decided to re-do the layout to make it more sizeable and explorable but not too open-ended, and I’ve also decided to start the level off in the entrance to the hallway of bedrooms rather than the entrance to the dining hall. I started creating a blockout of the layout within Unreal Engine 5, which I am currently expanding alongside the new level layout sketch I am working on. I also composed a few original music tracks via BandLab to use in-game, with music for all of the game’s three levels plus the title screen and the boss arena. I aimed for the game’s official soundtrack to be a mix of dark ambient and classical genres to match both the tone, setting, and atmosphere of our game.

Harrison - Within the pre-production period (6/10/25 -> 17/10/25), my main contributions towards the game were to do with world building and creating resources to use for reference with our designs. Our setting for the game is 1600’s Romania, in a gothic castle- so my first move was to research Romanian nobility titles, and Medieval Romanian Names, and I used this research to create a guideline for the team to follow in regards to naming, which was Title > Name and Surname > Epithet. I additionally did similar for gothic architecture, Vampire folklore, etc., as well as exploring how the Vampires would have adapted towards their weaknesses in comparison to how humans have- for instance, Vampires may have different armor to humans, as they’re focused on protecting their hearts and necks. I also worked closely with Tim and Tom on the designs/iterations for the first boss and for our knight character, as well as writing out their backstories, and ideas for the abilities of the Knight. Admittedly I did get caught up in the worldbuilding side of things and therefore fell behind in regards to my level design, however I’ve begun work on it and I’m positive that I’ll be caught up with a fully fleshed out level by the beginning of next week.

Dan -  I’m Dan and I'm the scrum master of the team so it's also part of my job to make sure that the team knows what they need to do and when it would need to be done by.

During the pre production stage, I have been putting together names and backstory to a couple of the characters in the game (The final boss and the mage). As well I have come up with some possible abilities for the mage, which I'm sure you would like if you enjoy playing a supportive character that can also deal heavy damage with great teamwork. As well as this I have put together a small level design prototype that I think would fit the setting, but I do plan on expanding it and making it all come together to make the game amazing for all the players.

I will have the bigger level plan all put together and have a base blockout level ready in the next week or two and can’t wait to show you all in the next log.

PROGRAMERS:

Kelvin - 6/10/2025 - 17/10/2025

Hi my names kelvin and im the build master for shades of crimson,

As for my work i have be tackling the players and how they interact with the world around them and I've been focused on making the game loop function correctly, without going into the nitty gritty of the spaghetti code I've been making things like -

- the menu functionality so the players can join the game and select their characters without a hitch…

- as of right now only one class has some of their skills programmed but that will change in the coming weeks…

- each level has been added and programmed to work with each other and in the future i’ll add the designers actual levels into these place holders and replace my beautiful programmer art standins…

- finally ive made the end game screen which is the most recent thing I've added to the project.

In the following weeks i’ll be adding more abilities to each player and i’ll be focusing on how the players will go between rooms and enter each level

Thomas - 6/10/2025 - 17/10/2025 I have made an enemy spawner that just continuously spawns enemies that will be expanded into round based spawning of the enemies, and also damage increase etc. I used a billboard component so that it’s easy for the designers to decide where to put them and see them in the level. I have also started working on the enemy AI where it will chase the player if it has line of sight, and if it doesn’t it will idle and patrol around a selected area. I need to get this working with the enemy spawner which should be an easy fix.

Thanks for Reading 💫

That’s it for our first dev log:)  Thanks so much for stopping by! We’re really proud to be working on Shades of Crimson and can’t wait to bring you along for the ride. Your support means a lot to us as students learning and growing through this project.

If you’d like to keep up with our progress, make sure to follow us here on itch.io and visit our TikTok and Instagram pages, drop a comment, or share your thoughts — we’d love to hear from you!

Until next time, The ShhhStudios Team 🎮

PS - When was the last time you guys ate some of these…