Building the fog: making a village feel like it's watching you

The fog was supposed to be an optimization. Early on it was just a way to hide how little of the village we’d actually built — draw distance as level design. Then we started playtesting, and something strange happened: people got quieter when the fog rolled in.

Fog in a horror game isn’t about what you hide. It’s about what the player thinks you’re hiding. We spent most of this month tuning density curves so the village feels legible enough to navigate but never safe enough to relax in. The trick that finally worked was tying fog density loosely to the character’s state — the more frightened he gets, the closer the world presses in.

Next month: getting the villagers to feel like they belong to the fog, instead of standing in front of it.

(This is a placeholder devlog entry written to make the layout real. Replace it with a genuine update before launch.)