Echo: Rogue Machine

A near-future horror game where you play a security guard trapped inside a corporate headquarters overrun by virus-infected robots — and you don't trust robots to begin with. Three years in development with a team that grew from 3 to 7 people, currently on hold while the team navigates work commitments.

Context

Project Librarian started in December 2022 with three game designers, myself included, working on it during our academy course. The following year the team grew to seven: two 3D artists, a programmer, and a sound designer joined. The scope grew with the team — we started aiming for a single high-quality Vertical Slice for our portfolios, and shifted the goal toward a playable demo we could eventually try to publish, at one point targeting Epic's Mega Grants program, which shaped our choice of Unreal Engine 5.

World & Premise

Set in 2111, Project Librarian puts you in the role of a human security guard with a deep distrust of robots, trapped inside the M.O.A.I. headquarters — a sprawling corporate facility overrun by compromised, virus-infected robotic soldiers. You navigate its corridors, solve puzzles, and face both physical threats and psychological horror as the truth behind the corporate conspiracy comes apart.

Market & Competitor Research

Before locking any direction, we ran a structured analysis of the horror genre: dozens of titles logged into a competitor matrix, each broken down by setting, genre, strengths, weaknesses, and unique selling points. We split them into three groups; direct, similar, and opposite competitors, to map where our idea would actually sit.

A few findings shaped real decisions. The data showed horror titles skew heavily single-player (85%) and favor first or third-person cameras over other perspectives, with over half the analyzed titles (57%) classified as horror outright, confirming that the genre's core audience expects exactly the kind of grounded, personal viewpoint we wanted to build around. On the closest comparables, facility, and vessel-set sci-fi horror like Dead Space, Alien: Isolation, The Callisto Protocol, and Doom (2016), we noted a recurring gap: strong atmosphere and setting, but often thin puzzle design or repetitive combat loops once the initial scare wore off. Titles like CoD: WWII's Zombie mode showed the opposite: strong environmental puzzles but a lighter horror atmosphere. That gap between "scary facility" and "satisfying puzzle design" is where we chose to position Project Librarian.

Audience research reinforced the direction: our target/age (TA) analysis found the 18-35 and under-18 groups nearly tied at the top of the horror audience, and showed that while male players lean toward stealth and female players toward puzzle/logic mechanics, survival horror is one of the few genres where preference is evenly split, which is exactly the mix of stealth, puzzle, and horror we set out to build.

Design Process

That research led the team to a specific choice: a sci-fi setting, but a restrained one, closer to near-future than space opera. It kept the horror grounded and let the robots feel like corrupted, familiar technology rather than an alien threat, directly informed by what set our strongest comparables apart from generic sci-fi horror.

My Contribution

Game Design: I took part in the brainstorming phase and led part of the competitor analysis, researching horror titles across settings and genres, and breaking down their gameplay, level design, and pacing to help the team identify the design gap Project Librarian could occupy.

Level Design — the Assembly Room

As the team split into smaller groups, each dedicated to one area of the game, I took ownership of the Assembly Room.

Problem: The room needed to do more than look good, it had to actively build anxiety and keep the player's pulse up, translating the "corrupted technology" premise into a space that felt actively hostile.

Approach: The room is built as a puzzle to solve, not just a space to walk through. It's a dark environment scattered with robot parts, arms, heads, legs, chips, some of which move on their own. A central chamber holds a pile of heads and torsos, surrounded by four smaller outer rooms. To escape, the player has to search these rooms for the components needed to restart the room's generator. I designed the layout and geometry to control what the player sees and when, working from the competitor analysis to shape a tighter, higher-pacing flow than a purely exploratory space would allow. Lighting, shadow, and VFX reinforce that same layout, hiding threats and directing attention exactly where the tension needed to build.

Key Decision: Layout, lighting, and enemy placement weren't treated as separate passes, I designed them together, so geometry funnels the player toward specific sightlines, lighting controls what those sightlines reveal, and the moving parts scattered through the room keep the player uncertain about which pieces are just debris and which might react to them. The payoff for solving the puzzle is also the room's biggest scare: once the generator powers back on, the robot the player has been building toward avoiding activates.

Outcome: A high-pacing, emotionally-charged space that ties its puzzle and its horror together instead of treating them as separate systems. The room is still a work in progress, the next step is layering in additional environmental and logical puzzles to add more depth for the player to actively engage with, not just react to.

Managing a Three-Year Project

Keeping a project alive for three years, with a team that grew from three people to seven partway through, brought its own design-adjacent challenges. Bringing 3D artists, a programmer, and a sound designer on board a year in meant re-aligning everyone around documentation that had originally been written for a three-person game-design team, and adjusting the room-by-room ownership model as scope expanded beyond what the original three could build alone. As the project moved past its academic origin, coordinating around everyone's individually shifting availability became the main challenge, which is ultimately what led to the current pause.

Current Status & Next Steps

The project is currently on hold, as the team's work commitments outside the project have taken priority. Project Librarian isn't shelved. it's paused, with the Assembly Room's puzzle layer and the broader push toward a publishable demo as the next milestones once the team can pick it back up.