Darkness

I'm interested in a different kind of experience: a horror game where the fear comes from the irrational certainty that something is hiding in the dark, when in reality, it's your own brain lying to you. This is one of those primordial fears that has been with me since I was a child, and I still find that my mind plays tricks on me under certain conditions of being "in the dark".

This prototype is my attempt to explore that idea through darkness, visual noise, movement, and sound. There are no monsters hiding behind every corner and no reliance on traditional jumpscares. Instead, I want the player to slowly become unsure of what they're actually seeing.

Darkness doesn't just hide things. It gives space for our brains to come up with stuff that lives in it.

Things I want to explore with this prototype

• How far I can push darkness itself as a source of tension
• How visual noise and poor visibility can make ordinary shapes feel threatening
• Motion-based illusions where something seems to appear only while you're moving
• Hallucinations that emerge from the same visual noise rather than appearing as obvious effects
• How 3D spatial audio can make sounds feel just as uncertain as things you can see
• Whether horror can come from making the player question their own senses rather than showing them a threat

I'm building the underlying systems myself in Godot, mostly because I want to understand how far I can take the idea. Also, I'm tired of being a webdev. I quit my job in February and have been pivoting all my knowledge into gamedev while honing all the new skills I've picked up along the way.

This is still very much a prototype. I'm experimenting, breaking things, and seeing what actually feels unsettling.

Inspirations

A big part of the visual direction came from this video:

Horror Games get Darkness WRONG, I Fixed it | Devlog by Wishbone Games

I'm also interested in this technique as a possible way of introducing patterns into the visual noise:

This game DISAPPEARS if you pause it! by Branta Games

Assets

I'm currently using:

• PSX Apartment Pack by rbarongr
• PSX House by postdev
• Brutal Skyboxes by Pizza Doggy

All of these were purchased because I've always loved PSX games. Even if credit isn't necessary, doing it is free.

AI Disclaimer

I do use AI during development, but in a very limited way.

Right now, I'm running IBM Granite 4.1 3B for inline code completions, locally on my own GPU using llama.cpp. The model is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

That's currently the only way I use LLMs for this project. No cloud-based models, agents, or frontier models are involved. I don't give an AI a task and let it go build things while I watch from the sidelines. The model is essentially an autocomplete tool that helps me write code a little faster.

The game design, systems, shaders, experiments, debugging, and decisions behind the project are still mine. I'm mentioning this because I want to be transparent about where AI is involved. Itch.io asks me where I use AI, but not really how I use it, and I don't want that checkbox to imply that I'm using AI to build the game for me.