The Graveyard

We are Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. We are the designers, directors and main creators of The Graveyard. We came up with the concept, we modeled and textured the 3D assets and we did all the programming. We were assisted by Laura Raines Smith who animated the protagonist, Kris Force, who produced the sound effects and Gerry De Mol who composed the music.

We had loved playing Pac Man and Space Invaders for all of our lives. So when we turned 50, we decided it was time to make such games ourselves.

Izegem, a small town in West-Vlaanderen, Belgium.

There was too much colour in the game. This was resolved by making everything greyscale. Which turned out to be a good thing because it gave us the idea to pretend that The Graveyard was art.

We forgot to add gameplay. And the avatar moves way too slowly. We should have added the ability for the avatar to jump. Then we could have used the graves as platforms and allowed the player to jump from one to the next. When you would have reached the highest grave, your cane would be upgraded to a butterfly net which could then be used to catch the birds. If you catch 10 birds, the birds would be upgraded into eagles that you could jump one to fly through The Graveyard. This would unlock the multiplayer part of the game in which every player plays an old lady who flies around on an eagle above the cemetery. They would use their butterfly nets to push each other off of the eagle. If you fall and you aim for the bench, you get to try again. But if you miss the bench, your corpse is immediately covered by a grave and you have to force quit the game and reinstall it if you want to play again. To make all of this more exciting, there would not be a quicksave function.

We worked on The Graveyard for three months. It is finished now, apart from the input of the players, of course. Many lifetimes remaining.

We imported lots of little people from an underexplored continent and we used whips and chains to encourage them to program the game for us.

Sometimes we also gave them food. But that didn't always work. They died before the game was done. But we released it anyway. This is why it's kind of boring.

The fact that there's so many dead people in them. Other games are inferior because most characters start out being alive. And then the player needs to do a lot of work to make them all dead. The Graveyard starts with a lot of dead and buried people already. So players can get to the fun part immediately without having to do all that work. The one remaining living person, can easily be killed to. By simply paying 5 Dollars for the full version of the game. Call it micro-transactions.

Call it the Korean model. It just works. We're millionaires! Because our games are fun!

The Graveyard is a strictly rules-based game with a challenging goal that is difficult to achieve. But we market it as a hippy art game in order to sell more copies.

We are considering making a sequel to The Graveyard. This version will be darker, more mature. The old lady will be a real mean bitch and she just doesn't want to go to The Graveyard anymore. She's sick of it all and can't stand all those dead people anymore. But as a player you will show her that it's not that bad once you unlock the ability to turn back time. It's a little bit creepy but it's a really ingenious game mechanic that we maybe shouldn't tell you about since it's so original. Basically you wind back time all the way until the people come out of their graves and then, then you, then it's easy to solve the puzzle! It's very mature and artistic.