DEVLOG

Started building the behavioral tracking system — the part that reads what the player did last session and adjusts the facility around it. This is the core mechanic and I've been putting it off because it's the hardest thing in the game to get right.

The problem is subtlety. If the facility adapts too visibly, players feel cheated. If it adapts too quietly, they never notice and the whole concept evaporates. Right now I'm testing with camera placement — whether a corridor camera tilts slightly toward a path the player used last session. It's maybe two degrees. In playtesting I ran it myself and still couldn't tell if it was my imagination.

That's the target. The player should never be certain the building is watching them. They should only suspect it.

Committed to Lumen for all facility lighting. The fluorescent warmth in the break rooms versus the colder overhead light in the maintenance corridors now feel completely different — which is exactly what I need. Moving from one to the other should feel like crossing a threshold even when nothing has happened yet.

I've spent an embarrassing amount of time on the break room lights specifically. They need to feel normal. Warm. Slightly too inviting in a way you can't name. Right now I'm landing somewhere between "nice office" and "someone's idea of what a nice office looks like," which is probably exactly right.

That gap is the game.

The in-game clock is working. The facility runs on a real-time 2.5 hour session mapped to an 8-hour workday. Intercom announcements fire on schedule. The break room fills up and empties at the right times. Your supervisor walks the floor at the same interval every day.

Predictable is important. The player has to learn the schedule before the schedule can start being wrong. Right now in early testing the middle of the day feels thin — it's just dead time between structured events. That's where coworker behavioral systems will do the heavy lifting, giving you things worth noticing even during the quiet parts.

The hardest design problem in this game isn't the horror. It's making the normal parts boring enough that the horror earns it.

Started with a question: what if a horror game never told you it was a horror game?

I'd been thinking about Severance and Papers Please at the same time — the workplace as a place where the mundane is the mechanic, where horror accumulates in the gap between what you're told and what you can see. The concept locked in fast. You work at a robotics company. You've had a procedure that splits your memory between your work self and your home self. Neither version of you has the full picture. The game is about the work self slowly understanding what's been done.

No combat. No weapons. Just a building, a job, and the growing certainty that something here is consuming people you know. The robots the company builds are everywhere. They are very helpful. They are always watching.

Shauns Games LLC formed April 2026. This is the first project. Building solo in UE5 out of Irvine, CA. Let's see how wrong it can get.