The horrors of rising water…and Thomas Hardy
A haunted manor in Devon could have inspired us in so many ways. But at the end of the day it was a mundane story of country maintenance, and the chance discovery of a book of Thomas Hardy's novels, which prompted us to design and build a game of a race against time to stop your house from being flooded.
![Play testing. Photo by Dafydd Vaughan.](/static/photos/df10/play-testing-dafydd-vaughan.987bae5496c7.jpg)
To save his home from water, he would have to dig.
With almost no experience designing games between us, we split into three teams: one building the game engine, one the UI, and one designing the levels. The last team spent a fair amount of time testing levels and game mechanics on a physical prototype, where one person played the game and another played the water. Feedback from this team affected the game engine, and vice versa.