// Fallowmere — outdoor quarantine zone at dusk

Game Prototype 2 — Fallowmere — is a solo survival-horror prototype built for GDEV40010 Game Prototyping at Staffordshire University (Level 4, 2024/25). The brief had a single narrative constraint: tell the entire story through the environment. No cutscenes, no explicit text — the world is the narrator.

Fallowmere is a quarantined small town under the iron grip of Vitae Industries, a biotech corporation. A mysterious cult — The Order of Genesis — operates in the shadows. The player is infected, holed up in an abandoned building, and must escape without losing their mind — a literal mechanic, not just a metaphor. A relentless stalker AI hunts them by sound, the microphone becomes a weapon against the player, and the only way out is through a keypad puzzle and a voice-based final challenge: say "I am not infected" to unlock the exit.

The visual world is entirely abstract — orange and amber geometry, dark brown buildings, dramatic dark red-orange cloudy skybox, and no textures. Atmosphere is created entirely through form, lighting, and sound.

// Fallowmere — quarantined town exterior

Fallowmere is a small town placed under quarantine by Vitae Industries — a biotech corporation whose motivations are never fully stated. Evidence of their presence is written into the environment: barriers, decontamination markings, the hum of authority without any visible agents. The town feels abandoned but not empty.

Beneath the corporate veneer, The Order of Genesis — a cult — has been operating within Fallowmere. Their relationship to the infection, to Vitae Industries, and to the player's own condition is left deliberately ambiguous, communicated only through the two collectable notes and the geometry of the world itself.

The player is infected. They wake in an abandoned building with no explanation. Survival requires navigating the environment without triggering the stalker, solving the puzzles embedded in the space, and — in the final moment — asserting their identity aloud. The voice puzzle is the only moment of character voice in the entire prototype.

The visual language is deliberately abstract. All geometry in the world is untextured — orange-amber sandy ground, dark brown building masses, and a dramatic dark red-orange clouded skybox. No realistic props, no detailed surfaces. The horror lives in shape and shadow.

// Sanity meter — annotated HUD breakdown

Every HUD element serves gameplay directly. Nothing decorative — each piece of the interface communicates a survival-critical signal.

// Keypad puzzle — code entry UI

The prototype's core loop ends in a two-part chained puzzle. Solving the keypad unlocks the voice trigger; the voice trigger unlocks the exit door. Neither step can be skipped.

Vosk runs offline — no API call, no latency spike. Audio is captured at 16000Hz on a background thread via MicrophoneHandler.cs, fed to Vosk's recogniser, and the JSON result is matched using Levenshtein distance in VoicePuzzleTrigger.cs. The fuzzy matching accounts for natural speech variation and ambient noise distortion.

// Stalker — enemy detection triggered

The stalker is the prototype's central threat — an entity that cannot be killed, only evaded. It navigates Fallowmere via Unity's NavMesh and maintains four internal states: Idle, Patrol, Investigate, and Chase. The base logic lives in the abstract EnemyBase.cs; StalkerEnemy.cs extends it with Fallowmere-specific behaviour.

The Field of View renderer uses a procedural mesh — 110° angle, 10m radius, 50 segments — visualising exactly what the enemy can see. Three eye-state icons on the top-centre HUD communicate the stalker's current awareness to the player in real time without breaking immersion.

Integrating Vosk into Unity 6 required threading audio capture on a background thread so it doesn't block the main loop, feeding raw PCM at 16000Hz into the recogniser, and parsing the JSON result for phrase matching. The entire pipeline runs with no internet connection — no API key, no cloud dependency, no latency spike from a round-trip call.

49 C# scripts were written across the five-sprint development period. The architecture covers every gameplay layer: AI, audio, UI, save/load, input, camera, and post-processing.

Development ran from 02/04/2025 to 06/05/2025 across five Agile sprints. Sprint 1 was the most chaotic — 28 tasks, the full foundation of every major system. Sprints 2–4 were each cut short by three days. Sprint 5 was the polish and final-feature sprint.

Development progress was recorded as unlisted YouTube videos throughout the sprint period. The main gameplay video was submitted to the GDEV40010 Digital Academy Forum alongside a deep development diary forum post.

Gameplay — Fallowmere (Submission)

NomNom · May 2025 · Unlisted

▶ Watch on YouTube →

Development Recording — Early Build

NomNom · Apr 2025 · Unlisted

▶ Watch on YouTube →

Environmental storytelling is harder than it looks. Removing all textual narrative forces every prop placement, lighting angle, and audio cue to carry communicative weight. Fallowmere's quarantine premise gives a clear visual language — but executing it convincingly in five weeks required sharp prioritisation.

Vosk in Unity 6 is non-trivial. Native libraries, background threading, PCM capture, JSON parsing, and Levenshtein fuzzy matching — none of it is out-of-the-box. The payoff is an interaction type that a button press cannot replicate. Worth every hour.

The microphone as threat vector was the best design decision. Making the player's own real-world sounds dangerous inverts the standard horror formula. Instead of the game generating fear, the player generates it themselves. Every cough, every accidental word, every ambient noise in the room is a risk.

Sprints 2–4 being cut short hurt scope. Three successive cut sprints reduced the time available for polish and additional content. The lesson: front-load the riskiest technical work (Vosk integration was in Sprint 1 for this reason). When time is cut, polish suffers first, not functionality.