Hey everyone! 👋

It’s been a few days since we released the demo, and I wanted to take a moment to share a bit about the development process — and about us as a team.

The project was born from an internal Game Jam at our university (UCSF). Instead of random themes, we decided to make the genres random for each group. We got “visual novel”, and honestly, none of us had much experience playing that genre, so we had to get creative and figure things out as we went.

At first, the game was going to take place entirely inside a hotel, where Ezra had to uncover what happened there — each floor representing a different chapter. When the event ended, I (Ayrton Toledo) kept iterating on the concept and developing the idea further. After some time, I shared the new direction with the team, and we decided to keep building on it.

Red Complex is the title of the series, and each chapter is self-contained, taking place in a different section of the complex.
📘 Our tentative roadmap looks like this: Hotel – Bunker – Hospital – Laboratory – Prison.

The project is being developed entirely in Unity, and almost all the models were created in Blender (with a few exceptions, like the keypad). We chose a low-poly visual style not only to maintain good performance but also to give the game a retro, old-school look — something I personally love, and as the director, I wanted that nostalgic aesthetic to define the tone of Red Complex.
Our 2D artist designed and created the characters using Krita.

The textures come from free, copyright-free resources, mainly AmbientCG and TextureCan, which offer high-quality materials that helped us achieve an aged, realistic environment while keeping the project accessible to everyone.

One of the biggest challenges was achieving the right lighting and shadow balance to create tension without affecting performance — especially for players testing the demo directly in the browser. In the end, we decided to use SSAO and skip real-time shadows (we think the result turned out pretty well 😅).

💻 Tomorrow we’ll be presenting this project to our programming professor and classmates.
After that, we’ll continue polishing details, fixing bugs, and improving the visual aspects of the demo.

💬 If you haven’t tried the demo yet, you can play it directly in your browser or download it from the game page.
And if you’d like to help us bring the full version to Steam, any donation will go directly toward the publishing costs.
🎁 Supporters will receive a Steam key once the full version is released.

Thank you all once again for the support and for being part of this beginning. 💀

— Team Circle