Winter's Hunger

Lead Systems Designer | Puzzle Design | Blueprint Scripting

Gameplay from Winter’s Hunger

Project Overview

Winter's Hunger is a first-person psychological horror game developed in Unreal Engine 5, built around the creeping dread of isolation, the mythos of the Wendigo, and immersive survival design. The game blends free-roam exploration with sanity mechanics, dynamic flashlight systems, and puzzle-solving, all tuned to sustain fear, disorientation, and player agency.

My Role & Contributions

As Lead Systems Designer and Writer, I drove both gameplay systems and narrative structure for Winter’s Hunger, ensuring that every mechanic served the tone of creeping dread. My work spanned core systems, AI behavior, and puzzle scripting, all developed in Unreal Engine 5 using Blueprint.

  • Sanity & Flashlight Systems: Designed a modular sanity meter affected by darkness, proximity to threats, and narrative triggers. Flashlight behavior directly impacted threat aggression and psychological states, creating mechanical and narrative tension.
  • Enemy AI (Wendigo): Built behavior trees to simulate stalking and reactive hunting. The Wendigo’s AI featured light-aversion logic, variable patrol patterns, and trigger-based ambush sequences.
  • Puzzle Implementation: Developed multi-phase puzzles where each solution carries systemic consequences. Examples include:
    • Cave Puzzle: Symbolic pathfinding under pressure, with sanity penalties on failure.
    • Chime Puzzle: Sound-memory and pattern recognition based on spectral audio cues.
    • Cabin Lock Puzzle: Symbol-matching and environmental clue hunting across time/weather states.
  • Team Collaboration: Collaborated closely with artists and programmers to align environmental storytelling and AI behaviors with puzzle mechanics. Led weekly syncs, coordinated asset handoffs, and adjusted pacing based on playtest feedback.
  • UX Feedback & Horror Signals: Tuned audio-visual feedback for sanity drops, puzzle failures, and enemy proximity. This included heartbeat audio layers, shader-based vignette effects, and camera shake scripts.

Across the project, I documented all systems in our Game Design Document, leading puzzle vision, mechanic balancing, and cross-discipline collaboration.

Puzzle Design Philosophy

Winter’s Hunger explores horror through mechanics, not just aesthetics. As the lead puzzle designer, I architected multi-phase interactions that integrate with survival systems, AI logic, and resource scarcity. Each puzzle acts as both narrative setpiece and player test, reinforcing themes like isolation, hunger, and dread.

My designs relied on modular scripting, trigger volume logic, and systemic consequence modeling. Players interact with puzzles that have multiple solutions, often trading one risk for another. For example:

  • Frozen Corpse Puzzle: Break a frozen hand with brute force (alerting the Wendigo later) or sacrifice fuel to melt it (costing warmth). Both solutions are valid; each impacts downstream systems.
  • Blood in the Snow: Environmental storytelling and symbol-based deduction guide the player through a branching cave system, one path punishes failure not with death, but a lasting psychological mechanic (auditory hallucinations).
  • Silent Feast: A “ghost logic” puzzle that uses player assumptions about survival to lure them into a trap, solved only through non-intuitive offering behavior tied to systemic inventory sacrifice.
  • Echo Chamber: A non-verbal music puzzle blending tribal symbology, sound-reactive stones, and ritual logic. Solving it requires aligning spatial feedback, sound cues, and learned symbology in sequence.

These puzzles are not “locked doors”, they are reactive micro-narratives. Success or failure reshapes not only the moment, but the systems that follow: ambient horror, survival mechanics, and even AI behavior. I approached each design with an emphasis on narrative embodiment through systems, ensuring every puzzle tells a story players feel, not just read.

Results & Impact

Winter’s Hunger was developed across two semesters as our senior capstone. My contributions ensured that narrative, tension, and gameplay were tightly interwoven. The project demonstrated my ability to prototype mechanics in Blueprint, develop system-driven horror pacing, and document workflows in a professional format. This title solidified my strengths in puzzle design, scripting, and leading design teams through complexity and iteration.