Home of Midnight Mansion

Big Announcement (Jan 29, 2025)

A Little History

Back in 2005, I release a game for the Mac called Midnight Mansion. To my surprise, it was an overnight success, selling dozens of copies in just the first week. I used the income to put myself through college, and then once I graduated, had dreams of running my own business, making more games. I spent several years working on Insectoid, an arcade space game shooter, and also created a sequel to Midnight Mansion called Midnight Mansion 2: The Haunted Hills.

During this time span Apple releassed a new operating system called OS X. Developers had to rewrite their software if they wanted it to keep running.
I did, using the Carbon compatibility layer to avoid having to do a total rewrite.

Later, Apple switched from PPC chips to Intel, again requiring developers to update their code.
Again I wrote new code, just to keep the game running.

Then with OS X 10.7, Apple removed the Carbon layer. I now had to totally rewrite the game if I wanted it to keep running.
I did, calling this version Midnight Mansion HD, which also had higher resolution graphics, some new mansions, and some new lighting effects.

Meanwhile, sales from Midnight Mansion were falling. Worse, Insectoid was a total failure. Not only had I invested over 2 years of my life into Insectoid's development, but I had also spent a lot of money on the art, level design, and music, and I never even broke even. This was incredibly demoralizing and hard to come back from.

I had hopes that Midnight Mansion 2 might save the day, but it didn't sell nearly as well as the original Midnight Mansion. Times were changing. Apple had released the iPhone, where users could play various games for 99 cents each, and tons of free flash games were available on the web. The day of the $20 shareware Mac game was numbered.

It used to be that I could just post a new version of the game on Download.com, MacUpdate.com, and various other sites, and new users would see it, and I'd get a boost in sales. In time though, Apple took away their version of such a site in exchange for the Mac App Store, which collects 30% of each sale made. Other sites that used to bring publicity brought hardly any at all. I tried paid advertising, but only break even at best. Even Ambrosia Software, once the leader in the Mac shareware game market, closed their doors.

Ultimately, making very little money, I was forced to get a 'real' job. In 2012, I was hired as a Softare Engineer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where I worked with a group that developed Nuclear Cardiology software. I had a 1-hour commute each way in LA traffic, and the work was not enjoyable, and after many years of this, I think I became somewhat depressed.

During that time I did not keep up with supporting Midnight Mansion orders very well, often taking months to process orders. My web host also updated the version of PHP running on the servers, which broke the registration system. I tried fixing it, but never did get the automated system working again, and had to process each order by hand, which was a painful process. It was also hard to justify investing the time in trying to fix something that had only a small handful of sales each month.

Fast forward to 2021. I landed an awesome new job at a company called Motional, where I now develop annotation tools for Robotaxis, and also got to work remote. (No more 2-hour-a-day commute!)

In addition, during 2021 I met a wonderful, loving woman who in 2022 became my wife. During our first two years of marriage, we focused on enjoying our relationship and starting life together.

However, customers kept writing saying how much they missed playing Midnight Mansion, and it was disappointing for me to have to tell each person that the game just didn't run anymore. Yet, the thought of the enormous amount of work involved in doing a new port was simply too much to contemplate, esp. while I already have a full-time job.

A New Era

Enter ChatGPT, and the modern age of AI tools. In mid 2024, I started experimenting with using Claude Sonnet and Cursor to undertake the heavy lifting of porting the game to JavaScript, so it can run on the web. I now write web software for my day job and am highly skilled at this, and have long dreamt of doing such a port, but it is no easy task. It's not just a change of language (C to JavaScript), it's also a change of animation libraries as well (SpriteWorld to PhaserJS). The amount of work required to complete such a port would be immense.

However, one day I decided to just start experimenting. I got PhaserJS, which seemed to have features similar to SpriteWorld, and I tried porting a small portion of the game... and it worked. Then another portion. Then another. I still had to write large portions of code myself and fix all kinds of bugs (A.I. doesn't get everything right!) but I'm a much better developer than I was in 2005, so even the code I had to write myself went far faster than I expected. And with A.I. to help, the process has gone remarkably well. Having an A.I. assistant is a bit like having a super-enthusiastic 8th-grader with moderate coding abilities and endless energy ready to help. It's not always the smartest, but the more rules you can give it to follow, the better it performs.

Fast forward to today, and more than half of the game is now ported and running in the web. ALL technical challenges that I thought might be a problem in the web port have already been solved and are working flawlessly. So I'm excited to announce:

Midnight Mansion for the web is coming, to be released sometime in 2025


Why the web?


First of all, unlike OS X, where Apple keeps forcing developers to rewrite and keep rewriting their code to keep running on its latest systems (the latest being the switch from Intel to ARM), the web offers a far more stable platform for developers. It will be far easier to maintain Midnight Mansion well into the future.

More importantly however, I will be able to offer the base game for free (with some ads), which might allow the game to attract a new audience. This is important, because more players means that I will be able to justify more support. I have dreams of porting not only Midnight Mansion HD, but also: But doing so requires having a solid base of players. As such, I'll be releasing a base version of the game for free with ads, and a paid tier for $5/month that removes ads, and adds other features such as (when ready) a Level Builder, Midnight Mansion 2, and other new features.

I realize this is a different model than Midnight Mansion players are used to, but I hope you can support the change, as it will allow me to breathe new life into a game that otherwise just can't be played anymore.

In addition, being on the web means that I can integrate the game with 3rd party mansions. In time I hope to build a system where 3rd party mansions are both built and playable in-game without the need to download any files or go to any forums. There will be mansion ratings, comments, chat, and more.

Of course, all of this will take quite some time to build. But I'm so excited about making Midnight Mansion come alive again. I've been working on it nearly every day after my day job ends and on weekends (I keep telling my wife, "I'm going to work on my game!" and she knows she won't see me for another few hours.)

I will likely post status updates from time to time on the Facebook Midnight Mansion fan page, so join that if you haven't and want to see the latest news. I also post free Midnight Mansion HD codes there on occasion, so it you are still able to run that version of the game somehow, you can use those codes to unlock that game.
Otherwise check back here mid-2025 to see what the latest news is!