Single-player psychological horror · In production
HUSHABYE
A first-person horror game I am developing in Unity 6, played by singing into the microphone. On a trial night as a babysitter in 1980s–90s Europe, the player watches the nursery through the infrared HUSH-1 baby monitor, and what lies in the crib sleeps only while someone sings.
How it plays
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Sing
When TALK blinks green, hold it and sing into your microphone.
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Be still
When the monitor goes dark and the breathing stops, it is listening: freeze and stay silent.
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Escape before six
Get the front-door key and turn it in the lock before the parents come home at six.
What I built
- Voice
- YIN pitch detection runs in real time and only on the player’s PC; the voice is never sent anywhere. A phrase judge scores every note against the melody in the singer’s own key, which their first steady note sets.
- DSP engine
- A C# engine that carries sound through walls, floors and doorways along a graph of the house’s zones. Each zone type has one of five FDN reverbs: room, kitchen, corridor, tiled bathroom and a dead pantry.
- Diegetic sound
- The monitor’s speaker is a lo-fi mono chain with hiss; the house around the player is full band. A sound with hiss is far away, and one without it is right next to you.
- Music box
- It plays retuned glockenspiel samples from VSCO 2 Community Edition (CC0) with a shorter decay, a 450 Hz high-pass, teeth detuned by ±3 cents and the whirr of the mechanism.
- Engine
- The game runs in Unity 6 with HDRP and is written in C#.
Stills