THE ENTITY (Entity.gd) borrows from three places and each borrowing does a job:
SLENDERMAN it does not move while you look at it, and has closed the distance every
time you look back. Looking is ALSO what builds the static — so the safe
option (keep it in view) kills you slowly and the fast option (run) lets
it catch up. That's the trap, and it's why Slender worked.
XENOMORPH it hunts SOUND, and the thing you came here to do is smash furniture.
Every break and every puff of powder drops a marker it walks toward.
Playing well is what feeds it. A loud enough noise overrides the freeze,
because staring is a valid answer to a stalker and not a valid answer to
something that just heard a sledgehammer hit a filing cabinet.
BLAIR WITCH the level wraps: walk far enough and you come out of the opposite wall
into the same room, because every room here IS the same room. A wrap is
also when it repositions, so "I've been here before" and "it's already
here" land in the same second.
It can't be fought. Getting caught doesn't kill you — it costs a lungful, a spike of
rage, and the knowledge that it can do that whenever it likes.
Deliberately unresolved design: 2.5 m, faceless, arms past the knees, cranium swept
backwards. Slenderman from the front, something else in profile. A silhouette your brain
finishes beats a monster it recognises. Blair Witch stick totems hang in the maze.
THE TAPE (Dread.gd) — one shader: grain, scanlines, chroma split, a wandering tracking
tear, an edge that breathes when it's near but unseen, and Slender interference driven
straight off the stare. The static IS the read-out; there's no meter for it.
TWO BUGS WORTH THE COMMIT MESSAGE
1. `seen_now` was a pure view-cone test with NO line of sight, so it built static
through walls — and in a maze that's most of the time.
2. Fixing that exposed the real one: the generated maze was so dense there was no
sightline longer than a few metres ANYWHERE, which kills the entity outright, since
a stalker you can never see can never be stared at. Thinned the generator — skip a
third of the lattice lines, much bigger gaps — which also matches the reference
photographs far better. They're mostly open floor with occasional slabs, not
corridors.
dev/probe_horror.gd verifies all of it headlessly, including hunting for a clear
sightline first (otherwise the Slender test silently tests nothing).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Monster Robot Party
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