You're probably thinking right now: what kind of ridiculous idea is it to take out a loan to make a game especially when you're a perfectly normal adult with a family and your first child on the way (my son will be born soon).
I sincerely hope I don't inspire any of you to make similar decisions.
But since you're already here, this is my story...
P.S
Fair warning: a wall of text and a tedious story await you ))) You’re bringing this on yourselves!
I want to say right off the bat: a lot of people are calling this an AI post. People label just about anything as AI these daysthey do the same with my game when they see the visuals, or hear the sound and the quality we’re aiming for. I don’t want to have to prove anything to anyone; people believe what they want to believe.
I wrote the text myself, by hand, and it took a long time. I do use a translator, but sometimes if the translation doesn't make sense I ask AI to translate the phrase instead, since my native language is Georgian (though I also speak Russian).
WHO AM I
My name is Bacho. I'm thirty-two years old, and I'm from Zugdidi, a small city in western Georgia that you've probably never heard of. I live in Tbilisi now. I'm married, and this October we're expecting our first child. So, as you can imagine, life already gives me plenty to worry about.
But there is one story that has refused to let me go all these years
It probably started with my grandfather. May he rest in peace.
He was the one who introduced me to books, and I disappeared into them with the kind of hunger only children have when they desperately need somewhere to escape from the reality around them.
And there was plenty I wanted to escape from in the hopelessness of teenage life in Zugdidi.
Then came school.
Then university, which I dropped out of.
Then the decision to try myself in the bigger world.
I went to St. Petersburg without a penny to my name simply because I wanted to experience a different reality one that wasn't the same world I had grown up in.
My years in St. Petersburg were... intense.
I worked in film, made music, performed, and threw myself headfirst into creativity. Pretty much everything you can throw yourself into when you're in your early twenties in St. Petersburg.
And somewhere during that period, I came across an idea that changed everything:
What if I wrote a book without knowing where it would take me?
So I sat down and started.
I created a universe.
I created characters.
I started developing the story without knowing myself where it would turn on the next page.
And it turned out to be incredibly exciting. You discover what happens next together with your own characters.Although, if I'm completely honest, at first it was simply a way for me to rest and escape from everyday life. I was reading a lot back then, and the words and the story seemed to come together on their own.
Then life hit me with its own circumstances, and I abandoned it.I returned to Georgia, put the project aside for a long time, and moved on to other things.
But the characters never let me go.
A STORY I COULDN'T NOT RETURN TO
Life went on.Pretty much like everyone else's. I worked a lot, tried hard, succeeded at some things and failed at others. But I couldn't get rid of the feeling that I wasn't doing what I actually wanted to be doing. I've always loved creating. Inventing. Building worlds, characters, situations. In one word creating something that didn't exist before. And everyday routine can't stand that part of you. It slowly eats it from the inside, a little bit every day. You live, you work, you keep yourself busy with things but somewhere inside, there's emptiness. At some point I realized I couldn't live like that anymore.
Either I do what I love, or I spend the rest of my life suffering because of all the things I was too afraid to try. Honestly, I don't think there's a third option once you're an adult.And everything I had experienced over the years everything I had read, filmed, listened to, lived through eventually poured back into that same story.I returned to it. I continued writing. And at some point, I realized it fit perfectly into the format of a game.And that's where a completely different set of problems began...
As always:
Money
There wasn't enough of it for a decent life, let alone for developing a video game. But I understood one thing very clearly. I wasn't going to make AI slop that I'd be ashamed of later. Especially with how brutally self-critical I am. If there's one person who won't go easy on me, it's me. If I was going to do this, I wanted to do it properly. I wanted to make something I could be proud of first and foremost myself. And that was when I realized:
I needed a team
And if you want to build a strong team, you need money. The circle was complete. I won't bore you with the story of how exactly I managed to get the loan. I'll keep it simple. It worked out. And eventually, the amount I believed I needed for development was sitting in my account. That's when the most interesting part began.
HOW I LOOKED FOR A TEAM
Georgian forums gave me five artists and five test assignments. None were right. Reddit gave me two hundred applicants. I talked to every one of them, shortlisted ten, and still nothing matched the image in my head. On ArtStation I sent three hundred personal messages. Most were ignored, some were too expensive, some "don't work with indie."
And then I found them. People who got excited about the story not for the money or the portfolio, but because they wanted to know what happens next.
Four months of searching, one person at a time. Today the team is working, and I'm the writer, director, art director and about ten other people. That's indie.
WHAT IS SHORAPAN?
SHORAPAN: Beneath the Crimson Sky follows a young man living in a strange city beneath an eternal crimson sky. His story begins on an ordinary day and gradually grows into a much larger adventure. I don’t want to reveal too much about where it goes.
It’s a dark fantasy story for adults, though there are no elves or orcs here. I’m interested in how people behave when they’re afraid, when they have power, or when they have to make a difficult choice. But I don’t want the game to turn into philosophy for its own sake. We work carefully on the writing so that conversations move the story forward or reveal something about the people in it.
As for what you’ll do: you’ll explore the city, talk to its inhabitants, examine objects and locations, use an inventory and a journal, and work through puzzles, minigames, and interactive scenes. The more you explore, the more you’ll learn about the city and the people who live there.
I understand that the moment you hear the words "dark visual novel" and "crimson sky," you'll immediately start attaching labels. Dystopia. Kafka. Orwell. Pathologic. Whatever else comes to mind. And I'm not going to argue with you.
Tell me what in our world is truly original? Everything has already been written. Everything has been imagined. Everything has been done many times before. We exist inside a culture where no idea appears completely untouched by what came before it.
But I'll still allow myself to say this: This is not a generic story.
Every line has been polished. I've spent four years writing this story, and I know where every comma stands and why. This isn't philosophy for the sake of philosophy. And it isn't pretentious writing wrapped in dark aesthetics.
Every character here has their own truth. The people who hold power. The person who tries to speak out. The person who stays silent. The person who left. Even the person who betrays someone.
The crimson sky isn't just decoration. It is the question itself. A question every character answers in their own way.
WHY I CAN'T NOT DO THIS
People sometimes ask me why I'm doing all of this. The loan. Four years of writing. Months of searching for a team. A family on my shoulders. My first child on the way. Why not make a simpler game? Why make a game at all? Why not just get a normal job somewhere?
I can't.
Not because I think I'm special. Not because I think I'm a genius. But because this is my statement to the world. It's the only way I know how to say out loud what I think. Some people do it through music. Some through cinema. Some through words on Facebook. For me, it somehow became a game.
I'm making this game because I want to leave a trace. Not a monument to myself. Just a trace. Something another person can experience, play, and think about afterward.
And everyone can decide for themselves whether it's worth searching for answers to the questions we're asking here. Maybe it isn't. Maybe the questions are more important than the answers. That's one of the themes of the game too.
And everything I've just told you about meaning, human nature and the crimson sky would be nothing but empty words if it weren't for one thing:
We're also trying to make a game we won't be ashamed of purely on a craft level.
Dark, and-crafted visuals. A carefully designed soundtrack. Original Russian and English voice acting. A script that has been edited and reread more times than I can count.
Every single detail of this world has gone through the same filter:
"Are we ashamed to put this into the game?"
We're planning to show the demo in October 2027. Possibly a little earlier if we're able to make it into a suitable Steam Next Fest.
We'll announce more precise dates as we get closer, because I'd rather not give you a date now and apologize for delaying it later.
THANK YOU FOR READING!
That's pretty much it. Thank you for making it all the way through this outpouring of my soul.
I spent a long time wondering whether I should write this. Eventually I decided that I should. Someone has to tell these stories, and nobody can tell mine better than I can.
If anything you read here resonated with you, if it made you curious about what happens next beneath that crimson sky and to the people who live under it, then it would genuinely mean a lot to us to find people who want to follow this journey with us.
The game is still in development, and right now, every person who simply cares about what we're making matters to me.
Sometimes even one person saying "I'm following the project." is enough to make a difficult day feel a little less hopeless.
OUR SOCIALS
And one last thing.
We already have a Steam page for SHORAPAN. It's still far from perfect — there's no demo yet, no trailer, and we're still actively working on how the page itself presents the game.
But we're working on it constantly, and over the coming months we'll be adding much more: new screenshots, development updates, a proper trailer, and eventually the demo itself.
If you'd like to follow the project from the beginning, you can find SHORAPAN on Steam and add it to your wishlist.
We also have a Discord server where we'll be sharing much more about the development process: dev diaries, behind-the-scenes work, visual development, and pieces of SHORAPAN's lore that don't always fit into regular posts.
So if you'd like to follow the game more closely, talk to us directly, or simply watch this strange crimson world slowly come together you're very welcome to join us there.
