With just one week to go until the launch of Post Trauma, we're celebrating the countdown to launch with several News Posts to answer some of your burning questions about the game, putting them to the creator, Roberto Serra of Red Soul Games.
Today, we're asking what was the inspiration behind the game, how long it's been in development, who's been working on it, and the games that left the biggest impression on Roberto.
Not long left to go - Don't forget to Wishlist Post Trauma if you haven't already and prepare for release on April 22!
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What Inspired You To Make Post Trauma
To be honest, I started the development of Post Trauma as something “just for fun” - At the time I was working at another indie studio, but I always wanted to do something of my own. I posted some screenshots on Twitter/X and to my surprise, the game got a lot of love. So I decided to quit my job and focus solely on Post Trauma.
I have always been a fan of old horror games, more slow paced with a big focus on puzzles and atmosphere over action scenes or big jumpscares. And as a hybrid developer - between an artist and a programmer - fixed cameras were the perfect excuse to make beautiful shots of any scene. I'm the type of player that, if given a good photo mode, will spend more time taking screenshots than actually playing. And in my personal opinion, fixed cameras can really work in favour of the horror aspects of the game.
How big is the team at Red Soul Games?
When people ask me how big the team at Red Soul Games is, I never know how to answer in a short sentence. So now that I have time, I will give you a long one.
Post Trauma started as a solo dev game. If you don't know me, my name is Roberto Serra and I used to work as a tech artist at Digital Sun Games (Moonlighter, Cataclismo, The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story).
Being a tech artist allowed me to write basic code and do a lot of the art on my own. There’s a lot of store bought assets that I had to adapt to fit into the style of the game, but of course I needed help if I wanted to finish the game.
Two months after signing with Raw Fury, in June of 2022, Pau Pujadas joined the team as a concept artist/art director. He is incredibly talented and elevated all the weird stuff I had in mind for the game times 10. I wish we could have included all the crazy concept art he did because some of that stuff is breathtaking. Pau's strongest skill is 2D art, but he also adapted really fast and was able to produce some amazing sculptures and organic fleshy monstrosities. And thanks to Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite, we could use optimized versions of those sculptures for the environments.
For the story I had a rough idea of the events that should happen in the game but I did not know how to develop the character or what to do with the world background. That’s why we contacted Cameron Suey to help us with that. I gave him some documents with vague ideas and story events and after a few calls he was able to produce an amazing world with great characters and well written dialogues. So although he is not a member of the Red Soul Games team, his contribution was very important to Post Trauma.
In February of 2023, almost a year into development, Andrés Montalvo joined the team as a 3D artist. He was a much-needed addition to the team, as Andrés was able to create actual good geometry for our game, and able to translate the 2D created concepts that Pau did, into amazing 3D models. He even designed some other great models on their own.
In July of 2023, we finally got an animator and Javier Alonso was able to animate our characters and creatures the way we wanted, up until that point we were using a mix of premade animations and procedural ones.
In the last year of development, a good friend of mine joined the team Francisco López, an Unreal Engine 5 developer, who helped me focus on other aspects of the game while he took care of the bigger programming tasks.
And not too long after him, Luis Monrocle, joined the team as audio designer. His work on the sound design of the game elevated the quality so much and made everything sound cohesive and oppressive.
Not to mention our fantastic composer, Nicolas Gasparini (Myuu) but we'll talk more about his work in another post!
That’s it. Of course, the credit list is way longer because we had help from a lot of amazing people from other companies. But the peak of simultaneous people working full time on the project was 5 people. And for most time during development, we were just 3 people working full time on Post Trauma.
What is the most important thing to understand about Post Trauma?
This is a very small, indie team - working on a game for three years - who have just tried their best to recreate something that looks like it fits on today’s market. We love these games just as much as you and with Post Trauma, we’ve tried to find a sweet spot that, we think, fans will appreciate. I think it’s important to recognise that this is a homage and a love letter to classic PS1/PS2 Survival Horror Games but we're just using modern day processing power and graphics to tell that story.
Modern horror games are quite different now - and that is a good thing - but sometimes I miss the feel older games offer. Post Trauma has been designed to feel like those older horror games, offering that alternative perspective we feel has been missing on the market for some time, and I hope you recognise that vibe immediately.
And just like those classic games, Post Trauma will not handhold you too much. The puzzles require some thinking but they are not impossible and will hopefully feel rewarding. The combat is simple - and there will be some jank here and there - but hopefully it's good enough that you will feel the tension, think about every item in your inventory and spend time thinking about your progress. Maybe even be a little bit afraid of dying and losing progress because you forgot to use the radio to save the game.
Or perhaps you will decide to restart a save on purpose because you accidentally used a shotgun shell on a weak enemy, realising that those are actually quite hard to find.
There will be puzzles, a lot of them, and you probably will need a pen and paper to help solve them. And while there is combat, the aim of the game is to build atmosphere through music, story-telling, setting a scene and making The Gloom and the environments Roman finds himself in incredibly distinct and unsettling.
This is classic survival horror re-imagined, but still a puzzle first experience. Our small team has done everything possible to try and bring this style back with a modern day feel.
Which games left the biggest impression on you?
A lot of them! It’s hard to pick.
My favourite game of all time is The Legend of Zelda, Majora’s Mask (The N64 version, not the more recent 3DS edition). The different ways characters in that game deal with their inevitable death was very interesting to me.
Silent Hill, of course, is a big inspiration. My favourite one is 4 and I really like how that game mixes fixed cameras with first person. But also after a few hours the game corrupts even your “safe place”.
However, I must say my favourite horror game is Dead Space! Post Trauma might have taken inspiration from all of those, because, even if I'm not adding those references on purpose, maybe my subconscious has because of all the games that I've played in the past.
How long has Post Trauma been in development?
The actual development has been exactly three years. I signed a contract with Raw Fury in April of 2022 which allowed me to restart the development.
Before that, all I had was a vague idea of what the game would be and a demo, which was made in a few months and somehow held together with duct tape and dreams.
But that initial demo got a strong reception, and not long after I signed with Raw Fury, we reannounced the game at The Game Awards. We’ve been building to this moment ever since.
It’s exciting, scary, daunting, and there’s been a few bumps in the road, but we’re excited for everyone to finally play the game on April 22!
See you in the Gloom
Roberto
