Submission by Master

Horror is hard to design. Anyone can make a player jump. Few can make them dread. Most horror games chase scope — sprawling maps, hours of mechanics, scares on a timer. The dread fades. The player adapts. Tension dies in playtime. The Hollow House goes small on purpose. It is a fifteen-minute first-person horror experience. Three friends take a shortcut through the woods and stumble into a house that does not want them to leave. They solve riddles posed by the house itself, examine documents, listen to whispered hints from each other, and survive whatever is hunting them — before they become the next set of scratched-out faces on the family photographs. Atmosphere comes first. The house breathes through audio. Every character has a voice. Aarav, the nervous calm one. Priya, who hears it before anyone else. Sam, who is too quiet. The narrator is dry. The presence is none of those things. Lines are generated dynamically from a single dialogue script, then routed by character. The entity passes through a Presence bus — layered pitch-shifted playback through lowpass, distortion, and reverb — so it feels diegetically wrong, not just loud. Footsteps duck under speech. Heartbeat and whispers ramp as you descend. A CRT shader sits over every frame — scanlines, vignette, faint flicker — like found footage you should not be watching. The entity only spawns in the basement. That one rule turns every other room into anticipation. Under the hood: Godot 4 on the gl_compatibility renderer for portability. Every voice line is generated and cached via the ElevenLabs Text-to-Speech API across five distinct voices — including a custom-tuned narrator and a layered demonic mix for the presence. The closing credit is pre-generated in parallel with the ending so the audio lands instantly. Built entirely in Zed. Every GDScript, every scene tweak, every gameplay system was iterated through Zed's AI agent — spec, draft, refine, ship — at the pace of conversation. The editor was the workflow, not just the surface. The Hollow House does not chase scares. It earns them.