• A massive snowstorm  has trapped you in an apartment during a vacation, someone or something is giving you instructions in a notebook, every passing day gets weirder.

• This game was built in 3-4 days for the Unreal Spring Jam.

• The game was a massive success, it was #1 on itch.io for a month and has a lot of gameplay videos from a lot of players. Feedback has been extremely positive and a lot of players are calling it one of the scariest indie horror game they’ve played, ever.

Download & Play here: https://bioxide.itch.io/linger

• Main Idea

I’ve been wanting to build another horror game for quite some months, mainly a smaller experience that took place in a modern apartment, something leaning towards a PT vibe with lots of psychological horror and little to no jump scares, I wanted to challenge myself to make something scary that didn’t rely on a lot of horror cliches you see nowadays. A day or two into the unreal spring jam 2020 I gave in to the temptation and went ahead with development, firstly looking at assets to purchase, I skimmed through some apartments and once I saw the ghost girl in the marketplace, everything clicked and began the grind. In the end, I accomplished building a good looking, fun, and scary experience, it’s not original, but it’s executed wonderfully.

• Level Design

Most of the level was already built by the apartment pack I purchased, although I did a lot of changes to the assets, mainly LOD’ing them and re-did the entire lighting of the house to fit the horror vibe.

• Programming

The entire game was built using blueprints in Unreal Engine 4, blueprints allowed me to quickly build the core mechanics during the game-jam since I only had a few days to finish the game. The game relies heavily on the interaction system that I built for it, allowing me to add interactivity to most of the apartment, such as being able to open/close doors, interact with electronics and turn lights on/off, which drastically increased the immersion factor of the game. There was some AI work with the ghost girl as well, just a simple state machine and some scripted sequences.

The other bulk of the game code was on the day system, which had a day manager and day actors that defined the goals, scripted sequences, and mechanics of each day, by encapsulating those into each day, I avoided a lot of redundancy and built an optimized development pipeline that allowed me to cram a lot of features and keep most of the readable and easy to work with.

• Animation Programming

Did a lot of animation tweaks and animation blueprint work on the ghost girl, plus retargeting so she could use another animation pack.

• Audio Engineering

The game has an amazing atmosphere that’s built mainly on the audio, I used a lot of soundly audio and tweaked them heavily to fit the game’s vibe. Also imported a lot of number stations/creepy audio from my first horror game and implemented those into the electronics and haunting system.