Subject Veil

The pitch

You are locked in a facility with something that cannot see. It navigates by sound, and every task you need to complete makes noise. The game is the negotiation between those two facts.

The stalker

The enemy runs a four-state finite state machine — patrol, investigate, hunt, and search-last-known-position — driven entirely by sound events rather than line of sight. That last state is the one that makes it feel alive: losing the player doesn’t reset the AI, it sends it hunting the place you were standing, which means breaking line of sight isn’t escape.

Sitting above the FSM is a director. It watches threat proximity and feeds the stalker hints about where the player probably is. The important constraint is that hints are hints — the director never hands over your exact position, because an omniscient enemy stops being scary and starts being unfair.

Tasks that split your attention

Progress happens through diegetic mini-games at task stations. They’re interruptible by design: you can abandon one mid-way and lose your progress on it, which turns every noise you hear into a live cost/benefit decision.

Tasks can also be tampered with, which forces you back through areas you’d already cleared. Re-traversal is how a small map keeps producing new tension without new geometry.

Where it is now

Core mechanics are locked. Current work is on the experiential side — theme, environment, and the feeling of the space — heading toward a vertical slice: one room, one task station, sound-only perception, one stalker.

TODO: swap this section for current status before you publish, and uncomment the youtube field once the demo video is up.