Guy Creates His Own Video Game During Covid-19 Lockdown

• 41-year-old Singaporean man Drew Pan created a game during the pandemic.
• He did all the work for visual novel game Gloom and Doom – from coding the game to writing the dialogues, to drawing the characters, and more.
• The game is all about the “desire for change,” he said in an interview.

In the middle of a pandemic, One man from Singapore decided to work on his lifelong dream of creating his own game. 41-year-old Drew Pan took advantage of the Covid-19 lockdown and came up with Gloom and Doom.

Released under Neo Tegoel Games, Pan’s very own one-man studio, Gloom and Doom is “a visual novel throwback to 90s social outcast movies – complete with the solitude, sad songs, and sarcastic retorts – but with a supernatural twist,” he wrote in a YouTube description for the game’s trailer.

Pan would later explain:

“I wanted to make my version of a 90s slacker movie, like the ones I love. Reality Bites, Clerks, Dazed and Confused. Gloom and Doom has demons and angels, but it’s a slacker story at heart.”

“A lot of us didn’t really like who we were in high school, or what we do at work, and we desperately wanted to change ourselves,” he likewise pointed out. “This game is about that desire for change, if you can imagine angels as the cool kids and the demons as the kids rejected for their individuality.”

Pan, who is also the scriptwriter and creator of upcoming television series The Teenage Textbook The Series, used his creativity to come up with interesting storyline and dialogue for the game.

His lack of coding skills proved to be a challenge but he did not let it stop him. He did some research and eventually ended up using Ren’py, the same game engine used for Doki Doki Literature Club.

“All this time, I thought game design required C++ programming skills, so it was always too daunting for me to seriously consider,” the father-of-two admitted. “But once I dug a little bit deeper, I found out that there are all these game engines put there. You’ve got 3D ones like Unreal and Unity that power a lot of modern games, and you’ve got 2D ones like RPG Maker that can help you easily create an old school game like Final Fantasy on the SNES.”

Pan also drew all the artwork for the game.

You can check out the trailer here: