My first self-made game was Die Flucht, a small point-and-click adventure where I did everything myself, even the backgrounds in Paint. Using photos from my camera, linked through Adventure Maker, I learned the basics of programming logic. I tested the game on family members and observed their reactions. This first step laid the foundation for Demonhour in 2013.    

Demonhour was initially called Horror Night and took place in my room on Grandma's attic, as well as in the hallway and the adjoining bathroom. Using simple if-then-else functions, I made a small spooky fun house out of photos that I had taken at night around Halloween. By clicking on the edges you could pan back and forth between the slides and when you clicked on special areas or doors a random sound played and let the player navigate freely. A bit like Myst ordered on Wish. Poorly cut out PNG ghost faces from Google search provided the horror and I showed the finished project to a dozen friends.  

My audience was particularly pleased with my detailed comments. I plastered all the screens with finely detailed hitboxes, which, when clicked, gave anecdotes, allusions and explanations about my life. A mixture of witty entertainment and voyeuristic curiosity was what drove people. The horror was simple and unintentionally funny, but people liked it as a fun project. Inspired by the James Wan blockbuster Insidious, I renamed the project to Demonhour and took photos of Grandma's entire house.  

Upstairs, downstairs, garden, including Grandma herself, I expanded the three initial levels to eighteen with several bonus contents. The mini-game was particularly popular, where I imitated Granny's voice and she called out for symbols that you had to find on flying balloons faster and faster.

Six months after the first one, I started working on Demonhour II and immediately got to know the designer's disease. First of all, everything was twice or three times as big. Instead of one house, why not build seven houses like that and a lot of things around it, and in the end, you can't fill any of it. I built a lot of stage and in the end I didn't know what to perform and how to connect them. I spent a year building in vain and then abandoned the whole project. For another good year, nothing happened about Demonhour.  

In 2016, I streamed Demonhour with a friend and also showed excerpts from my abandoned second part. All of this motivated me again and I got sick, had weeks at home to create something. This became the real second part: A Demonhour Story. As originally planned, the part began in my current apartment, mainly because I was still working with photos and clicking together a 2D adventure. It was much shorter, but there was more to do and more to discover.  

I pushed the software, which hadn't been updated for over ten years and was actually designed for 1024x768 to its limits. Around Halloween 2017 I even worked on a patch! 3D rendered maps and more content were added. Bugs were fixed and I started to spin the story a little further. The technical framework was still catastrophic and during the Corona period I took the page with the download link offline and only talked about these projects from then on.

By 2022, I wanted to reimagine Demonhour and began working on Demonhour 3(D). Using new tools like Unity and Blender, I brought my grandmother’s house into the third dimension for the first time. I learned how to bake lightmaps, create textures, and build 3D assets efficiently. Slowly but steadily, the project grew with new rooms, sound effects, and even a small soundtrack.  

I drew funny caricatures of family members, had textures created for me and did a bit of planning. I've always been good at that. I was mostly designing, not implementing. I've been designing since I was a child, ever since I walked around with a Chinese notebook.

Whenever I had time, I added a few rooms, objects or sounds to Grandma's villa. I commissioned an artist to design artwork for Demonhour and grabbed musicians and actors for voice lines and a small soundtrack. It took me two weeks to learn how textures work and how to set the mood for a scene with light. How to bake lightmaps and build simple furniture yourself. 

I wanted to continue working on Demonhour alone. It was my baby. In 2024, the company I had worked for with great joy over the past few years was ripped apart and that gave me completely different life topics than continuing my hobbies. My work for this company was also the fuel that allowed me to delve deeper into the gaming subject matter and made Demonhour 3 possible!  

By the end of 2024, I was trained in Unreal Engine and Blender and was slowly getting interested again. I had uploaded Demonhour 3 to VRChat during the development period so that it could be tested and played continuously. Sometimes I enter that building ground with friends and take notes! Around 20.000 visits that map tathered over the years.

The first thing I did was to optimize it. Building everything without interruption so that every object in the CPU was working at all times was simply not a good idea. So I divided the villa and of course added new areas. My own apartment was implemented again, this time in 3D! It was to be an homage to Demonhour 2 and A Demonhour Story. Grandma's house was to be the only real horror house and I expanded it. The popular mini-game from part one naturally had to be brought back. Those were my plans.