Hope Harbour Camera Club

You Know That Feeling

That Quiet Voice Saying You're Not Quite Good Enough

Hope Harbour Camera Club started as an answer to that feeling. A two week photography holiday in a harbour town, a camera in hand, a list of things to capture. Slowly, the game stops being about getting the shot right and starts being about paying attention.

Develop your own film. Choose what to print. Unlock a Polaroid, an underwater camera, even a pinhole camera in a wellington boot. Every new lens, a new way of seeing.

The Old Bicycle Shop darkroom — bottles, trays and a red safelight

Every New Lens

A New Way of Seeing

Cameras you find, trade for, and unlock as you settle into harbour life.

In-game screenshot looking through the camera viewfinder at a harbour cat

Through the viewfinder — the dial along the bottom is your shutter speed.

PolaroidInstant · one shot, no second guesses

Underwater CameraFor the rockpools and the harbour depths

A pinhole camera built into a wellington boot

The Wellington BootA pinhole camera, against all good sense

The Journey Here

Five Days, the Rising Tide Challenge

This trailer exists because of the Rising Tide Challenge, run by Global Game Jam and Blue Ocean Games — a competition built to help small developers turn early ideas into something fundable. Five days before the deadline, we decided to put everything behind one entry rather than split focus across two, and built this from the ground up: new illustrations, new Godot scenes, a script rewritten line by line, a voiceover recorded fresh.

None of it happens in isolation. This trailer is also the latest chapter of something that started months earlier, on the Scottish Games Developers Association's Games Accelerator. That programme is where Hope Harbour Camera Club first found its shape as a real, pitchable idea, and where I met people who pushed the work further than I'd have taken it alone.

Django, an Orkney farmer character, standing by his tractor outside a wooden shed

Particular thanks to Jess Hide, mentor through that accelerator, whose notes on the trailer voiceover script, on language, on tone, on what a player should feel rather than be told, are woven through almost every line you hear in this trailer.

Thanks too to my son, whose illustration of Django and his tractor became the heart of the game's first character encounter, and whose idea for how that character should be discovered shaped the way the whole game now reveals its world.

And thanks to everyone at Hoxa Games' wider circle, in Orkney and beyond, who've encouraged a small studio at the edge of Scotland to keep making things.

About Hoxa Games

A Team of One, With a Lot of Help Along the Way

Hoxa Games is a new independent studio based in Orkney, Scotland, founded in 2024. Hope Harbour Camera Club is our first original narrative title — built by a team of one, shaped through the SGDA Games Accelerator, with a lot of help along the way.

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