Overview
A playable 2D top-down horror and stealth project that turns AI state, pathfinding, sight, sound, and interaction into testable player-facing behavior.
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Original GameMaker project
The Changed
The Changed is an original GameMaker project where tension comes from engineering how an enemy senses, searches, pursues, navigates a space, and responds when the player disrupts a plan.
Playable system buildAI & gameplay systems
AUTOTEST outdoor routeOpen gallery
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What I built
- Playable top-down rooms with exploration, pickups, doors, hiding spots, combat, light/darkness, and route objectives.
- An active enemy controller that patrols, reacts to sight and hearing, chases, remembers a last-known position, searches, and resumes patrol.
- Grid navigation with collision handling, obstacle detours, door pursuit, and bounded cross-room search behavior.
- Focused deterministic AUTOTEST scenarios and stress fixtures for movement, AI, doors, interaction, and progression routes.
Key systems & features
Stateful enemy behavior
Patrol, sight/hearing detection, search, and chase transitions are treated as explicit behavior contracts rather than one monolithic reaction.
Path-aware pursuit
Enemy movement uses grid paths, obstacle detours, collision checks, and door-aware pursuit so a valid route does not become a visual shortcut.
Readable stealth rules
Vision, sound, hiding, last-known position, and room search are connected so the player can learn why the world reacted.
Regression harness
Deterministic scenarios exercise ordinary movement, crowding, doors, path recovery, combat, and real progression without relying only on manual playthroughs.
Technical challenges
Tension still has to feel fair
A stealth encounter works only when the player can read the relationship between sight, sound, cover, collision, and enemy response.
Complexity needs boundaries
The active enemy keeps behavior smaller and testable instead of restoring a sprawling legacy controller with overlapping recovery paths.
Stack & technologies
- GameMaker
- GML
- mp_grid pathfinding
- Collision systems
- AUTOTEST harness
- PowerShell regression tooling
What this demonstrates
- State-machine and event-driven engineering
- Navigation, collision, and interaction design
- Debugging complex behavior through deterministic tests
- Maintaining a system with clear, reversible capability boundaries
Current status
Current status: active original GameMaker project with a playable system build and test tooling. It is not presented as a released title, a commercial product, or a sales result.
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