Lost Memories

Overview

Lost Memories, is a 3D first-person horror game where the player encarnates Billy, an 67-year-old man. He went to his old house to remember some of this lost memories, but something is strange, and he is reviving all his memories in a loop.

I worked as a Game and Technical Designer on this project, designing and implementing through blueprints core mechanics, player experience, and horror sequences.

Itch.io

Project details

Studio: Whisper studio
My role: Game & Technical designer
Genre: Horror, first-person, singleplayer
Platform: PC
Dev duration: Feb 2022 - June 2022
Engine: Unreal Engine 4

My Contributions

Designed and implemented core gameplay systems:

Player movement with smooth, responsive controls.
Dynamic camera system for immersive perspectives.
Customizable input system for intuitive player experience.

Designed and integrated an interactive object inspection mechanic:

Enabled players to rotate, zoom, and examine items.
Added contextual interactions to deepen engagement.

Created a looping level progression system using invisible portals:

Seamless transitions between loops without loading screens.
Balanced design to maintain player immersion and narrative flow.

Designed and implemented horror sequences:

Scripted tension-building events with dynamic triggers.
Integrated audio-visual cues to enhance fear factor.

Design Challenges

The challenge

Lost Memories is a horror game built around reliving memories in a loop. The core experience depends on the player feeling like they are genuinely returning to the same spaces. Loops need to feel natural and the levels need to feel real and grounded, not like disconnected game rooms stitched together.

The design challenge was finding a way to connect independent levels so the transitions felt seamless and reinforced the loop experience rather than breaking it.

Our approach

We designed each level as an independent space and connected them using portals built with real-time camera capture rendered onto textures in Unreal Engine. This allowed players to see through to the next space before stepping into it, reinforcing the sense of continuity and making the loops feel physically present rather than loaded behind a door.

What broke

01 — Low resolution at distance

Portals rendered at low resolution when viewed from far away, breaking the illusion entirely. The effect that was supposed to make levels feel connected was instead making them feel cheap.

We addressed this by redesigning the corridors leading to portals with L-shaped turns, ensuring a portal was never visible from a long distance. Players would always encounter them up close, where the resolution held up.

02 — Performance

Real-time camera capture is expensive to render. With multiple levels each requiring at least 2 portals, we quickly reached 10 or more active portals simultaneously, making the game unplayable due to the rendering issue.

How we fixed it

We moved away from portals as the primary connection system entirely. Instead, we connected levels through short transition corridors with two doors, a well-established pattern in games used to stream levels in and out without the player noticing.

This solved the performance problem and had an unexpected design benefit. These corridors became safe zones between loops, a deliberate breathing space where the player feels temporarily out of danger. This helped balance the tension curve and made the horror moments in the levels land harder by contrast.

Portals were kept in the project for select narrative moments where the visual effect genuinely serves the story.

Result

Performance issues eliminated. The game runs smoothly regardless of the number of active levels.

The transition corridors doubled as safe zones, improving the tension curve and making horror moments more impactful.

Portals were preserved for narrative use, where their visual impact is most effective.

The level transitions go unnoticed. The loops feel natural and continuous, delivering exactly the immersive experience we were designing for.