First Steps Into the Mirror-Realm

Hi everyone! This is our second devlog for rêver, our 2D horror game about escaping a labyrinthine mirror-universe haunted by your shadow self. Last time, we shared our core ideas and vision. Since then, we’ve officially begun designing and implementing the game, and things are slowly coming to life!

🎨 Art & Design Progress

We now have sketches for our character, enemy, and environment designs. These aren’t final yet, but they’re helping us shape the mood and tone of the game. For the visuals, we’re aiming for a gothic and surreal style, blending distorted domestic spaces with eerie, dreamlike details. The environments are being designed with a focus on distorted familiarity, rooms that look like “home,” but just slightly wrong, unsettling, and oppressive. These early layouts will also guide puzzle placement and the AI’s movement patterns.

🛠️ Mechanics & Programming Progress

On the technical side, we’ve been working on some of the core mechanics that will define gameplay:

• Player Movement & Stamina
  • Walking, sprinting, and a stamina system are in place, so managing how you move (and when to sprint) already adds tension.
• Flashlight Mechanic
  • Implemented a conical/directional flashlight for exploring dark areas. Visibility is limited, so it’s already feeling tense even in placeholder test rooms.
• AI Enemy (Early Version)
  • We’ve started building the enemy’s intelligence using a basic heatmap modification system, where it updates its knowledge of where the player has been. It’s primitive right now, but it’s the first step toward an adversary that learns how to hunt you.
• Player & Object Interactions
• The player can now open doors (normal doors, one-way doors, and locked doors), and pick up key fragments, which is the start of the item/escape puzzle loop.
• Mirror interactable acts as a window into another part of the map, showing those rooms in real time, adding both a gameplay tool and a spooky twist to exploration.

💡 What’s Next

Over the next few weeks, we plan to:

• Expand the enemy AI’s learning behaviour.
• Prototype room puzzles.
• Combining the different mechanics into one playable scene to test how they work together.
• Implementing the layout of the house so navigation, exploration, and scares start to feel cohesive.
• Finalising art and design direction, moving from sketches to pixel art.

That’s it for this update! Thanks for following our journey as we bring this surreal mirror-realm to life. As always, feedback and suggestions are welcome.