Jameson's Door

> *What could be more sacred than family love? Now think, what could be more thorny than the path leading to it?*
>
> Tagline

**Jameson's Door** is the main installment in the Sightless Highland Franchise - series of psychological survival games, comic and more. The game currently being developed by a non-profit community of people known as SH-Team.

The game project has two prequel comics, which take place before the main character reaches the age of 40.

## Plot

"*Main thing in life is family and children*" - these words are the first thing the player sees after starting the game, after which begins the intro, where a man is sitting in a room with a girl who is playing with a doll. The man - presumably the father - asks his daughter what she named the doll, and she says the name, after which the father goes into memory of her uncle, saying that he would not like to stir up the past. After that, the actual game begins, the action of which is supposed to take place in the past relative to the intro.

Calm Glade - the location where the main action of the game takes place - was a small town somewhere in Europe that was infamous for the low level of education of the local population, in fact, not much higher than in the poor sections of Africa. But be that as it may, for Jameson Saunders (that same man from the intro) - a loser in life, this was a great place, because he could easily earn a living as an English literature teacher at a local school...

**The plot is currently in development. About what it can be in general terms, you can read on the article regarding the "arcade version" of the game.**

## Gameplay

Jameson's Door positions itself as a kind of survival horror experiment. In general terms, everything is quite prosaic - she invites the player to go through the whole city together with the main character in search of a way out of the current situation, meeting Non Playable Characters along the way, which, depending on the situation, can either just give a hint to the player or radically change the state of affairs (for example, make him drop his weapon or move him to another location). At first glance, Jameson's Door is not much different from classic games like Silent Hill, Resident Evil and more - you move around locations, collect items, solve puzzles and so on. However, it is worth noting that there is quite a bit of time spent fighting monsters (but this gameplay detail is not completely removed like Silent Hill Shattered Memories), there is even a whole part in the game where you do not fight anyone at all. At such moments, the game focuses not so much on gameplay as on story cutscenes that tell the player a linear storyline.

However, your hero is not immortal - he can be killed both by creatures and by some features of the landscape (such as chasms, fire, and so on). Therefore, the player is given the opportunity to go to the inventory screen, where you can both check how much health the hero has, and check the list of items.

The protagonist cannot carry the map of locations, but this is not a problem in most cases, as the maps is displayed on billboards at the streets as the game progresses. But in locations that take place indoors, this can become a problem, which can be offset by the ability to save at any time during the gameplay.

There are only four weapons in the game, two each for melee and firearms. The first includes a kitchen knife (the only weapon that the protagonist has until the end of the game) and a harpoon (which occurs only once and immediately disappears), the second category of weapons includes a pistol (which the player is forced to throw away according to the plot) and shotgun (which leave after passing the location of the travel agency).

The player cannot heal their wounds - there are no medicines in the game, and in fact the only time the hero can restore his health (albeit to the maximum) is one story cutscene in the middle of the game. This is compensated by the fact that the already small number of monsters, on top of everything, inflict quite a bit of damage and none of them has the ability to attack the protagonist from afar.

There is no way to predict the appearance of monsters in the game or to illuminate the environment - in other words, the game lacks such stereotypical survival horror details as a radio and a flashlight. The latter follows mainly due to the fact that there are practically no dark places in the game, most of the game takes place outdoors and during the daytime, and indoors, as a rule, the level of lighting is at an acceptable level. This is due to the fact that the authors wanted to move away from the traditional methods of intimidating players in a different direction, such as the fear of daylight and so on.

There are often moments in the game when the player needs to run away from monsters or peoples. If you fall into the clutches of your pursuers, then the end of the game will immediately come, and it is pointless to resist at such moments, so the only thing left to do is to run forward, since there is no such element in the game as fatigue when running.

## Music and sound

For the time being, the sound design and soundtrack for Jameson's Door was handled by the Polish composer and sound designer Raimund "RiROBOT`s" Clement. One day he lost a HDD, and in connection with this, he posted all the sound developments on Yandex.Disk under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Since then, nothing has been known about him, but in any case, the game has, in fact, a completely ready-made sound and music bank, which can be easily integrated into the game engine (sounds and music are presented in .ogg Vorbis format). More information about music can be found on this page.

## Trivia

* For the most part, "Jameson's Door" game is a nod to the commercial game series - Silent Hill by Konami, and the movie that inspired it, Jacob's Ladder by Adrian Lyne. However, of course, these are far from the only sources of inspiration.
* The storyline of "Jameson's Door" is based on the story of the 12 sons of Jacob, but reworked so heavy that it takes wild mass guessing to find any clues to it.
* Previously, the game had a code name, which was then given to a separate project.
* Initially, the game was supposed to be called "SH-Demo" - which is for short "Sightless Highland Demo". However, then the user under the nickname "vadbor" on IndiEngine's forum gave his idea for the name.