Developing a World, One Negative at a Time

Games have always occupied a particular place in my imagination, somewhere between the intimacy of a film frame and the freedom of a world that allows you to step inside it. What has drawn me to them is the way an image can become a place, a place can hold a story, and a small decision can change our relationship with everything we have seen. For years, I wanted to work within that space: to build environments, shape their atmosphere, design the paths through them, and give the audience a role in what happens next.

The difficulty was translating that desire into something playable. I could imagine the scenes, compose the images, and hear the rhythm of the story, yet the distance between a visual idea and a functioning game was measured in a language I did not command: code. That technical threshold kept an old ambition suspended, close enough to picture clearly, but difficult to bring into the world.

NEGATIVI is my attempt to cross that threshold. It is a prototype through which I am bringing together game design, UI navigation, worldbuilding, storytelling, and art direction, drawing from the films, games, and fragments of popular culture that have shaped my visual vocabulary. These influences meet in the choices I make about framing, pacing, interaction, and the information a scene chooses to withhold. A story that might once have remained a sequence of images is becoming a point-and-click horror game that someone can enter, investigate, and interpret.

Developing the truth

The game takes place in Tirana in November 1998. Nora spends her nights in her father’s photographic archive, gathering torn negatives and developing them in his darkroom. The photographs reveal more than forgotten events: they change what the city remembers. As Nora brings the truth into view, her own place in that city begins to disappear. Neighbours stop recognising her, her reflection becomes unreliable, and her name fades from the records that once confirmed she belonged.

Photography gives this idea both its visual language and its central action. A negative contains an image that cannot be read fully until it has been developed; that suspended state, somewhere between evidence and possibility, becomes the foundation of the investigation. Each negative is torn into three pieces scattered around the city, and developing those fragments changes what witnesses are willing to say. The player has to return to people, reconsider details, and decide how far to pursue an image whose consequences extend beyond the paper.

One night per case

Designing these interactions has made me think about storytelling through verbs. Searching, developing, connecting, answering, and waiting each carry a different kind of tension. A case lasts one night, from 21:00 to 05:00, and every action takes time. The player sees its cost before committing, but knowing the cost does not make the choice comfortable: another conversation might bring an essential clue, while leaving too little time to develop the remaining evidence.

At dawn, any negative left undeveloped burns.

The night therefore becomes part of the narrative, pressing against every decision.

That pressure is accompanied by Fading, or Zbehja: the measure of Nora’s gradual disappearance from the world’s memory. Discovering the truth raises it, and its consequences reach into both the story and the artwork. Her portrait loses its colour and definition, mirrors cease to return her image, and certain relationships and routes become inaccessible.

I wanted progress to have a visible emotional cost, so that uncovering something important could leave the player looking at a little less of the person who uncovered it.

Even hesitation needs a place

The interface is central to making that experience readable. Designing navigation means deciding what the player can understand at a glance, where their attention should move, and how they can act without losing their connection to the scene. Time costs must be clear before a choice; evidence must remain easy to revisit; the passage between a location, a conversation, and the case board must support the rhythm of investigation. Even hesitation needs a place in the design.

Within the fiction, information lives in tactile objects: case folders, torn cardboard, handwritten labels, carbon paper, and photographs connected with red thread. Prompts and notifications occupy a separate cool cyan layer, set in clean typography, so the player’s guidance remains distinct from Nora’s evidence. This separation allows the archive to feel physically inhabited while keeping the interaction legible.

On the case board, connections produce observations and questions; the player writes the night’s theory, and the game never confirms whether that conclusion is correct.

Interpretation remains their responsibility.

A city that holds part of the story

The world around those systems is deliberately specific. Concrete apartment blocks, stairwells, a neighbourhood bar with a CRT television, and the archive of a former state photographer anchor the story in late-1990s Tirana. I approach the period through its materials, its light, and the ways people occupy a room. A corridor can suggest how neighbours live beside one another; a folder can carry the weight of an institution; an unanswered knock can turn a familiar doorway into a decision. These details give the investigation a social setting and allow the city to hold part of the story.

Visually, I am composing the game as a series of analogue photographs, with grain, soft halation, deep blacks, aged paper, and small pools of tungsten light. Red belongs to the darkroom and to danger. Movement is restrained: rain on glass, a flickering bulb, chemicals spreading across photographic paper. Dissolves carry the player between scenes, while muffled knocks, the darkroom timer, and distant sounds extend the tension beyond the frame.

There is no combat and there are no ghosts. The horror grows from human actions, uncertain evidence, and the quiet loss of recognition.

Holding the decisions together

AI has made it possible for me to develop and test this vision more quickly, shortening the distance between an artistic intention and something I can interact with. I use image and video tools, including Higgsfield and Freepik, to produce visual material under my direction, while the engine and code are developed in collaboration with Claude. This process still requires selection, revision, and a consistent standard: a compelling image has to belong to the scene, an animation has to respect its atmosphere, and a functioning interaction has to serve the story. My role is to hold those decisions together.

NEGATIVI is still in development, but its first chapter, Case 0014: “The Child in the Courtyard,” is fully playable in the browser on desktop, tablet, and phone. It is being developed in Albanian, with English planned, and Steam and mobile as target platforms.

For me, this prototype makes a long-held ambition tangible.

I can enter a scene I once only imagined, follow its paths, feel where its rhythm breaks, and reshape it until the story begins to speak through the player’s actions.

Negativi — project