Overview
Play Here: On Itch.io!
Description: Investigate a cursed game within a defunct game studio, uncovering the long-hidden horrors behind their unfinished creation.
Discover clues throughout the office of Liminal Run, the creators of the legendary Forest Quest. The company mysteriously shut down while creating their sequel, each and every developer seemingly disappearing from the face of the earth. Use the clues from the office to discover unfinished parts of the game – and parts never meant to be seen.
This project was created for IGME-601: Game Development Processes.
Project Length: September 2025 – December 2025
My Contribution
For this project, I was our Team Lead, Producer and Creative Director. This means I worked on creating our puzzles, narrative, and core gameplay loop. Other responsibilities included:
- Monitoring Playtests
- Programming development tools
- Assisting in gameplay system design
- Art Integration
- Creating & Integrating Post-processing effects
As our Team Lead & Producer, I organized and maintained our Jira board throughout our project. I assigned tasks and created pipelines for our project to minimize redundancies and ensure our time was utilized to the fullest. Due to the scale of our project and the expectations of the class, maintaining usable and up-to-date documentation was paramount. I took on the brunt of this documentation maintenance throughout the project.
Throughout the project, we followed the SCRUM methodology. This means we engaged in retrospectives, sprints and all rituals associated with it, and postmortems on our project and process. I led my team throughout all of these, making sure the team knew what their next task was at all times.
As our Creative Director, I was responsible for making a majority of the creative decisions throughout the project. I created our game’s puzzles, requiring the player to jump in and out of the 3D office and the 2D game.
One example of this is our Temple puzzle. This puzzle required the player to solve not only the point & click-like adventure within the game, but to use the solution to find clues in the office to continue.
A large part of our game is horror, which gave us a lot of freedom to approach it however we wanted. We really liked the idea of crash screens, and used them to scare players with unnerving visuals.
We wanted to create a dichotomy between the cutesy pixel art of the game and the dark, creepy moments when the mysterious creatures tries to take control. This led to most of the game being bright and pastel, with our horror segments being dark and disquieting.
Josh Chen 