3D Prop Artist: Abhinav Das | Design & Development: Karuna Ketan
What creates more anxiety: Ghosts or Paperwork?
Eclipse of Fear is a first-person survival horror prototype set in a college campus after midnight. What begins as a simple, relatable student task of submitting mandatory leave forms escalates into a tense survival experience as enemies, resources, and the environment itself grow increasingly hostile.
The project focuses on creating fear through pressure, pacing, and systemic escalation rather than scripted jump scares or inflated enemy counts.
A realistic college campus becomes unsettling through lighting, sound, and scarcity, making players uneasy without relying on monsters.
Traditional health was replaced with three physical leave forms. Each death burns one paper, making failure feel narrative and emotional.
Tutorials are replaced with the protagonist’s thoughts, subtly teaching mechanics while maintaining total immersion.
Completing objectives makes the world more dangerous instead of safer. Success triggers tension, not relief.
I start off by setting a clear experience pillar: Fear through Pressure.
This became my "why" for every design decision. I wanted to avoid the power fantasy typical of shooters. Instead, I focused on vulnerability.
The aesthetic is one of Academic Horror—dark corridors, locked faculty offices, and the oppressive silence of a campus at night. I adopted a top-down approach: defining the emotional curve (Curiosity → Anxiety → Panic → Relief) and building systems to service that curve.
Hostel Zone. Teaches movement safely. Introduces the Flashlight as a necessity. Intrigue is placed about the forms.
Academic Block. Exploration opens up. Finding the Gun triggers the first Minion wave. The genre shifts to survival.
Key Hunt. The Boss ("The Eclipse") appears. The final run back to the hostel tests every mechanic learned under maximum pressure.
Designed in 4 waves to escalate tension. Logic implemented using UE5 Behavior Trees.
Sensing Interval: 0.05s (Alert but fair, relative to player movement speed).
Represents the looming deadline. A relentless force that cannot be easily stopped.
Sensing Interval: 0.02s (Feels smarter/faster than minions).
The core loop is designed to oscillate between tension and short moments of relief to prevent fatigue while maintaining fear.
Following the design pillar of "Grounded Horror," I iterated from 2D paper layouts directly to high-fidelity lighting passes. The goal was to ensure the layout generated anxiety before placing a single enemy.
Comparing the initial layout logic vs. the final atmospheric implementation in UE5.
The campus is designed as a Semi-Open World. Unlike a linear corridor shooter, the layout features interconnected buildings (Main Building, Resource Buildings, Hostel) with gated paths.
I designed the flow to force players to criss-cross dangerous open areas to reach specific buildings (MB1, MB2), increasing the risk of encounters with every objective completed.
Top-down view of the campus showing interconnected buildings and gated paths.
Visual language of light guiding the player.
Inspired by The Last of Us and Resident Evil 4, I defined a strict visual language using light to guide players without UI markers.
I designed a 4-wave progression system where difficulty scales via Speed and Behavior rather than just health pools.
To maintain immersion, I replaced standard "hearts" with UI Forms. Hearts didn't make sense for a horror game.
Contextual hints triggered by invisible volumes replace UI markers. This keeps the player in the world.
Diegetic guidance: The text floats in 3D space near the trigger.
I originally designed a system called "Fear Lockdown." The concept was that completing an objective didn't make you safe—it made the world hostile.
Every time you delivered a form, the environment would permanently change: lights would flicker and die, alarms would scream, and new enemy spawns would trigger in previously safe rooms. The goal was to make the player fear their own success.
Decision: Due to time constraints, I cut this to focus on polishing the core AI waves.
Lesson: Strong ideas are only valuable if they support completion. Cutting features is a design decision, not a failure. It allowed me to ship a stable core loop instead of a buggy mess.
A complete, unedited playthrough showing the full pacing curve, from the initial quiet exploration to the final climactic escape.
Comprehensive technical documents covering system mechanics and level design.
These documents are designed for quick skimming, focused on systems architecture, AI logic, and data balancing.
Deep dive into the core mechanics, AI behavior trees, and the "Lives as Papers" health system logic.
Raw data tables covering player movement speeds, weapon fire rates, and enemy damage scaling per wave.
Before entering the engine, the level flow, enemy placements, and save systems were planned on paper. These raw sketches show the early thinking process.
