Needless to say, at that point, I practically knew nothing whatsoever about game development. I also had a game that apparently was popular before it was even close to being made. What was I supposed to do? I had three to four months’ worth of savings. I got thousands of followers pretty much overnight. To my surprise, DARQ became #10 of the most upvoted titles on Greenlight. A friend of mine, a filmmaker, encouraged me to put together a short trailer and upload it to Steam Greenlight (which was still around at the time). A month later, I had a little prototype that barely resembled what DARQ looks like now. I felt like a kid in a candy store – it was love at first sight. Once, I had a month off in between film scoring gigs, so I decided to download Unity and just give it a try. A short film? An animation? A video game? I didn’t know what it would be at the time. Something that I could both make and write music for. Something that would allow for full creative freedom. As I was learning the craft of film scoring, I came to realize that I had a strong desire for creating a project of my own. I got to score a number of indie movies and contributed additional music to a few larger films, working alongside Marco Beltrami, a renowned composer known for his scores for Scream, World War Z, and others. Fresh out of college, I was incredibly lucky to join the roster of GSA, one of the most established talent agencies in Hollywood (representing such composers as John Williams). Although my name is listed in the credits of some Hollywood movies, I was still in the early stage of my film composing career at the time. You’ve had a career in music with scores for Hollywood movies so what was the catalyst for wanting to make a video game? Was it something that you always wanted to do or was it a random, lightbulb moment that just popped into your head one day that you wanted to try something different? Wlad, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. A big thanks to Wlad and Scott for their willingness to take part and to Wlad for the prompt reply to my questions! What follows is an email interview with on making Darq, the lessons he learned and his journey from composer to game developer. Thanks to publisher Feardemic, I played the Complete Edition and I enjoyed it a lot thanks to its visual style that has hints of Tim Burton and game play that reminds me of Little Nightmares and Limbo.Īfter playing through the main game, I had a few questions about the development of the game, though, and Marhulets’ transition from composer to game developer, so I asked Feardemic PR man Scott Millard if I could ask Marhulets some questions about it – and he was more than happy to. Quite an achievement and Marhulets even wrote a book about his development experience. Darq, a 2.5D side-scrolling puzzler featuring a boy called Lloyd who is tormented by the horrors in his lucid dreams, is the work of essentially one man: Wlad Marhulets, who was a movie score composer when he decided to decided to check out videogame development engine Unity and make a video game.Īfter 3.5 years of development – and many, many hours later – Darq was released in 2019, has spawned two pieces of DLC (The Tower and The Crypt) and recently, the Complete Edition was released.
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