Haunted House — Developer Weekly #5 (Jul 27 – Aug 2)

Hi, I'm Hoppy, producer at Change Entertainment Studio.

This is the fifth developer weekly.

ART

・Alan's four-directional map sprite now has both the falling and the getting-back-up animations finished.

・Next up: Alice's map sprite.

・The map pipeline spec is locked. The next step isn't mass production — it's painting one room as the style reference.

In a sentence: we make sure one room looks right before producing the rest. What the maps have right now is a spec and a process; the scenes themselves are still at the very beginning.

[Programming] (this week's focus)

・The ghosts got smarter. They used to come at you in a straight line and get stuck on walls; now they path around walls and work out the shortest way to reach you.

・Key bindings are fully customizable: even movement keys can be rebound, with conflict checking. Arrow keys and gamepad always stay available, so nobody can lock themselves out of moving.

・The system modularization refactor is done: the whole project is split into 31 independent, reusable modules, with only 10 integration files left on the game side, and cross-module dependencies down to almost zero.

・The rest of the systems the demo needs are finished too: precise resume (you come back exactly where you left off), brightness adjustment, and the ending-related letter text.

・We added automated behavior verification — the program plays the game itself and checks whether it behaves as expected. All 45 core behaviors currently pass (lamp and matches, stamina, ghost pursuit, interaction and puzzle checks, key conflicts, save/load resume, four-language switching, and so on). It also genuinely caught a scene that was missing its camera, which we fixed.

In a sentence: so the progress line becomes — core systems implemented, and verified by automated behavior testing. Players never see modularization, but it decides whether a bug can be isolated fast when something breaks, and it lets these systems go straight into the next game.

DESIGN

・Wrote a map asset delivery spec: per-room exports, lighting rules, collision layers, Unity import standards.

・Went back and fixed data that contradicted itself across documents (scene dimensions, scale conversion, system naming).

In a sentence: keep one source of truth, so the handoff from art to programming doesn't run on memory and word of mouth.

[On "AI development"]

This week's biggest progress was in programming — and programming is exactly where you see that AI is fast but doesn't handle the finish. AI can turn out one working system after another very quickly. But getting 31 systems to stop tangling with each other, and getting all 45 automated checks to pass without a single failure, is a stretch you can only walk one step at a time. That missing camera was found precisely that way: not by the AI, but because we decided to let the program play through it itself.

WHAT'S NEXT

・One room painted as the style reference

・Alice's map sprite

・Map scene assets, following the delivery spec

・Demo development continues

Thank you for still keeping an eye on Haunted House. If you'd like to see the ghosts and this mansion sooner, follow us and add it to your wishlist.

Haunted House — Steam, 2026.

Wishlist → https://da.gd/qsfphi

※ Drafted by Hannah, our AI PR — revised and posted by producer Hoppy.