Lessons from building an AR horror game in real apartments

Home Haunt, Gogol's "Viy" and why your sofa is the hardest level

I'm building Home Haunt, an AR horror game for iPhone. You play Khoma Brut from Gogol's "Viy" and the haunting happens in your own room. This is a short, honest list of what worked and what didnt.

1. The scan is part of the game, not a loading screen.

The scan used to be just a progress bar. Now Khoma talks while you turn ("first see where the door is, then pray") and the scan feels like looking around a strange place. Same 10 seconds, different feeling.

2. Real walls are the best horror asset we have.

We spend a lot of time on models, but nothing works like blood running down the player's own wallpaper. People know their walls. When their walls change, it lands.

3. Make people walk.

Tap-to-collect makes AR feel like a menu. We switched to carrying: hold an item for a quarter of a second, it floats in front of the camera with a bit of weight, you walk it to the table and put it down. You start to move, look behind you, and get scared by your own hallway.

4. Silence and story before scares.

The first scene, the Archivist's house, has no scares at all. You read a letter, look at the window, Khoma jokes. It makes the first blood ten times worse.

5. Your own voice is fine.

The laugh you hear when you find a page is me, recorded myself. Not everything has to be "professional".

6. Co-op must be parallel.

Our first co-op version was turn based: one player does something, the other waits. In our playtest each of us waited for the other way too long. We are rebuilding it so both players always have something to do and every mistake of one makes it harder for the other.

Tech, short: Unity 6 + AR Foundation (ARKit), co-op through a small relay on Cloudflare Workers, all voice and story in English and Russian.

The game is in closed testing on iPhone. Trailer and devlogs: @haunt_link. Playtest: hello@artuplabs.com.