The Children Are Sleeping

What is this game?

A first-person horror puzzle game built with Unreal Engine 5. As tech lead and AI/gameplay programmer, I designed the monster behavior system, replaced random patrols with weighted loops to stabilize encounters, and coordinated a 4-person engineering team in a 13-person production.

Team Info

• Role: Tech Lead & AI/Gameplay Programmer
• Team: Tech 4 / Art 5 / Design 4 — 13 total
• Engine/Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Behavior Trees, Perforce

Contributions

• Tech lead and AI/gameplay programmer on a 13-person Unreal Engine 5 horror puzzle project.
• Designed a four-phase monster AI (Patrol → Chase → Prediction → Capture) in Behavior Trees; the Prediction phase continues pursuit along last-known direction after line-of-sight is broken.
• Replaced naive random navmesh patrols with a weighted patrol system; on one of our main levels this brought first-encounter timing into a 12–48 second window (previously 30–100 seconds+) and stabilized encounters at around 2 per 3–5 minute run.
• Exposed Behavior Tree parameters (FOV, wait times, loop weights) so designers could tune pacing directly without code changes.

Challenges & Solutions

• Random patrols produced unfairly long droughts or back-to-back encounters; the weighted loop system redistributed probability at shared nodes to get more predictable encounter pacing.
• Early prototypes dropped chase immediately when vision broke; the Prediction phase preserves tension by continuing pursuit along the last known direction for a short window.
• Designers needed to own pacing and tension without relying on programmers, so we surfaced key knobs directly in Behavior Tree services and blackboard values.

Gallery