Immersive video game

 Hello, my name is Elliot Black. Im a game designer and have been working on a game for the last 2 years or so. What I am about to tell you 100% real. Id use my twitter account as proof but I deleted it for reasons you will come to understand. My Twitter name was Elliot Black Studios so use the wayback machine to find it if you wish. Im a huge fan of horror games. I really enjoy being scared playing in the dark all alone. I wanted to combine horror games with immersive gaming. My game would use your own house as the map you would play in. Talk about immersive right? How did I accomplish this? To setup the game, it rewuired you to have a speaker and a microphone. Then it would use a rudimentary form of echolocation to map out your house. The better your speaker, the more detailed the map. It would then take textures that I had preloaded into the system and put them on objects that matched the default objects. This system was buggy at best and only worked about 73% of the time. You could then virtually walk around your house while sitting at your computer. I also made it so in the setup phase you could go around your house and pinpoint what objects were what so the textures could be more accurate. The goal of the game is to escape as your house had been transported to Hell. Before I added any characters I needed to get the echo system to work better than it currently was. It took me about 6 months but I finally got it to where it could produce a map in full detail about 90% of the time. Everything seemed to be going great at that point. I was working in the game making it so you could move items around to barricade yourself into an area. I was pretty tired as I had worked a 12 hour shift and had been working on my game for 4 hours already. I saved my progress and turned my servers off so they could cool down and went to bed. Im not kidding when I say I almost shit my pants. In my room my night stand had been moved to infront of my bedroom door blocking it. I never moved it and wouldn’t have been able to as it was preventing me from entering my bedroom.i was to tired to question it and finally went to bed. I woke up about 2 hours later and sat bolt upright. My nightstand was the item I was using for testing item movement in my game. I had used it to block my bedroom door from opening in game. A few weeks pass and I eventually forgot about that incident. I needed to add the antagonist character to the game. And since the game is based in Hell I used a demon as the inspiration. In the game you would never actually see the demon head on. It would be a shadow in the corner of your vision or you could hear it walking around a couple rooms away. The goal of the game now was to escape without being caught. And the demon could hear you. The game used your mic audio to broadcast your location essentially. I also made it so you had to have a mic to play the game and you couldn’t mute it as anything less than a certain decibel would pause the game. Your mic makes noise even when you don’t. The game was turning out to be amazing. I play tested it so many times and loved it. I made the game and even I didn’t know what was going to happen. The only way you could tell if you were going to die is youd hear breathing right behind you and then she screen would go black. After a few months of tweaking here and there I was almost ready for a closed beta test. I uploaded my game to my main servers that cost more than im willing to admit and waited. I was waiting for Halloween of 2019 to open the beta. But that’s when things got weird. I went to go check my system files just to make sure everything was ready to go. I noticed that the audio file was way to big. Originally it was about 50 GB but now it was over 400Gb in size. Inside the audio file were millions of audio files named “Kill_Elliot” I listened to one and it was just a recording of someone with a very deep voice saying “kill elliot” honestly i ridnt think much of it as my friend in IT had been over the day before to make sure the servers could handle the load of the 100 beta testers. I honestly thought he had played a joke on me and put it out of my mind. Two weeks till the beta test and that’s when things got bad. I went to do some last minute bug fixes that I had neglected to fix. And I heard the sounds of someone walking around through my headset. No big deal, I was playing through the game. But I had failed to realize that my headset wasn’t plugged in. Once I did a chill ran up my spine as I lived alone and have no pets. I kept playing through the game after I checked through my house. Every once in awhile I would see a shadow out of the corner of my eye. Then it got really quiet and I heard someone breathing on my neck. Not just heard, I felt the hot breath on my neck like someone was right behind me. Then all of the sudden my server crashed and my power went out. Keep in mind its about 1am and pitch black. I got my phone light on and ran out the door after I grabbed my keys. For the next 3 weeks I stayed at a friends house and didn’t go home. I kept seeing things and hearing things all the time. Eventually I had myself admitted to a psych ward and stayed there for 6 months. I tried to come back to twitter and tried to work on the game again but I just couldn’t. I deleted everything and haven’t tried to recreate anything. I don’t know what happened but hopefully its over.