luigis-mansion-nightmare

Luigi's Mansion Nightmare
And the grand prize is indeed a big mansion! But something seems off...
Summary
Luigi’s Mansion Nightmare is a compilation of components that are a part of the Luigi’s Bloody Mansion project which eventually evolved into Luigi’s Mansion The Tribulation over the course of its five year development life cycle. The project aims to create a more grim atmosphere within the first Luigi’s Mansion title through asset modding, sequence scripting, video editing, and alternative lore writing. This was inspired by the atmosphere and nature of the first Luigi’s Mansion game in comparison to its successors which took a notably lighter and more “family friendly” tone. Many other mods of the first Luigi’s Mansion have also been developed over the years to enhance its darker aspects and more grave undertones. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Luigi’s Mansion Nightmare YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Luigi walking down a hallway inside of a wooden frame.
Process
Developing the project started with just playing through Luigi’s Mansion extensively and taking notes of its environment, themes, and general world-building. Before the drafting process even started for the first version of Luigi’s Bloody Mansion (LBM), I had played through the first title in the series well over four times. While there were also some mods available for the game at the time, they were not as comprehensive nor transformative as the creations that are currently on the market of rom patches. Growing curious about the lighting system of Luigi’s Mansion and display technology, I began modding the lighting and tone visuals of the game through external programs such as ReShade, OBS, and CGM. This opened up a whole new range of options for the making the game more unsettling. By the 2020s, I had become pretty preoccupied with visually manipulating the game this way and began thinking about adding overlay features such as the Game Boy Horror timer from the beta version of the game. My knowledge about the game, its development history, and fan theories surrounding it was fairly deep since I had spent years following parts of its dedicated community relating to modding, theory writing, pre-release research, and speedrunning. With the visual presentation changed, I began to write a new story to go along with it. However, shortly after the first version of Luigi’s Bloody Mansion was released, the project paused development and did not resume development until Luigi’s Mansion The Tribulation (LMTT), a remake and re-imagining of LBM, hit the scene. LMTT aimed to realize a brand new story with the Luigi’s Mansion engine and saw everything being utilized from custom textures and code modification tables to custom BGM packs and real time motion graphics. The development of LMTT took about twice the time of LBM and saw most of its development happen between the months of October 2024 and January 2025 with a non-stop 14 week development period.
Title screen with the words Luigi's Mansion The Tribulation.
Reflection
Luigi’s Mansion The Tribulation was my dream project since it required that I utilize every facet of my skillset to craft a brand new experience out of a preexisting piece of media. It pulled on my knowledge of SFX design, soundscape composition, illustration, graphics restoration, animation, hex editing, essential programming, VFX design, package management, and so much more. As the project started to materialize over the weeks, the storytelling became more ambitious as I saw new connections and imagined deeper narrative points. This enabled me to include all of the content and ideas of Luigi’s Bloody Mansion, including the ones that did not make it into LBM. For the length of production and ideas explored, Luigi’s Mansion The Tribulation is one of the very few design productions of mine that really reflect the work of being an Experiential Multimedia Design Developer.
Translucent Luigi walking around in a graveyard at night with a glowing grave and burning torches.