A three-level first-person suspense prototype with puzzles, scripted triggers, and atmosphere — built from a course and taught step by step in a complete playlist.
This project is a first-person suspense game prototype built in Blueprints with Unreal Engine 4, developed following this Udemy course. It’s the most structurally complete game in the early part of this series — three distinct levels with simple puzzles, a consistent atmospheric style, and a progression arc from beginning to end. After building it, I recorded a full step-by-step teaching playlist walking through every implementation decision.
You can watch the complete teaching playlist here: YouTube Playlist
You can also watch a demo of the finished prototype here: YouTube
Three Levels as a Design Challenge
Most prototypes in this series are single-scene demos — one environment, one mechanic, one loop. Building a game with three distinct levels adds a design challenge that demos don’t have: the levels need to feel like a coherent progression rather than three separate demos. The difficulty should escalate. The environment should evolve. The puzzles should build on each other conceptually.
For a suspense game specifically, level progression has a particular shape: the first level establishes the tone and teaches the player the interaction vocabulary — how triggers work, what they can interact with, what the rules are. The second level increases the complexity and density of events, raising tension. The third level is the climax — the most intense, the most atmospheric, the most demanding of the player’s accumulated understanding of the game’s systems.
Designing this arc requires thinking about the player’s emotional state as they progress, not just the technical requirements of each level. A suspense game that maintains the same intensity throughout loses its impact — tension requires contrast, moments of calm that make the unsettling moments more effective.
Trigger System as Narrative Tool
The trigger-based event system covered in the SpaceShip game project appears here in a more mature form — not just as a technical mechanism but as a storytelling tool. In a suspense game, triggers are how the designer controls the pacing of revelations: the player discovers something unsettling not because the game tells them what to feel, but because they walked into a room and a trigger fired that made something happen.
The craft of trigger-based suspense design is in the gap between cause and effect. A trigger that fires a jump scare immediately on entry is cheap — the player has no time to feel dread. A trigger that fires a distant sound, then thirty seconds later a closer sound, then a visual change, then a final event — that sequence builds genuine unease because the player is anticipating, not just reacting.
Three levels of trigger events means three iterations of this design problem, each with a different setup and different resolution. The second and third levels can build on what the first established — the player now knows that sounds precede events, so sound design in later levels carries more weight because the player is actively listening.
Lighting as Atmosphere
Lighting in a suspense game has a functional role beyond visual quality — it controls what the player can and cannot see, which is one of the primary generators of tension. The unknown is frightening; well-lit areas are safe. Managing this contrast deliberately is what makes an environment feel designed for suspense rather than merely dark.
The lighting in this prototype uses the same components covered in the Lighting project — Directional Light, Point Lights, Post-Process Volume — but applied with atmospheric intent rather than technical correctness as the primary goal. Corridors are lit with a single low-intensity source at one end, creating a gradient from dim safety to dark uncertainty. Rooms have unexpected light sources — a flickering lamp, light coming from under a closed door — that imply activity without revealing it.
The Post-Process Volume contributes heavily to the overall feel: desaturated color grade to drain the warmth from the environment, heavy vignette to narrow the perceived field of view, and low exposure to make the player’s eyes feel adjusted to darkness. These are the same techniques used by horror game developers to produce the sensation of being in a place that feels wrong.
Simple Puzzles as Progression Gates
The puzzles gate progression between areas — the player cannot advance until they solve the current puzzle, which forces them to engage fully with the environment before moving on. Simple puzzles in a suspense context serve a double purpose: they are the mechanical reason the player explores, and they are the emotional reason the player lingers in uncomfortable spaces.
The puzzle design follows the find-and-use model: find a key or a code, use it on the matching lock. This is intentionally simple — the complexity in a suspense game comes from the atmosphere surrounding the puzzle, not from the puzzle itself. A key hidden in a drawer in a dark room with unsettling audio is more impactful than a complex logical puzzle in a well-lit safe space.
Each level introduces one puzzle mechanic and resolves it within that level. The player doesn’t carry unsolved puzzles between levels — each level is a complete experience that ends with the resolution of its central challenge and a transition to the next environment.
Character Animation
The first-person character has animated hands visible at the bottom of the screen — a common technique for giving the player a physical presence in a first-person game. The hands animate in response to player actions: reaching forward during an interaction, reacting to startle events. These animations are authored in the Animation Blueprint and triggered by gameplay events rather than playing continuously.
Visible hands in a first-person suspense game serve an important experiential function: they ground the player in the body of their character and make the environment feel real-scale. An empty first-person view — just a camera moving through space — reduces immersion because there’s no physical reference for the player’s presence in the world. The hands, even minimally animated, close this gap.
Teaching a Three-Level Game
Recording the teaching playlist for this project was more complex than the SpaceShip game playlist — three levels means three environments, three sets of triggers, and a progression arc that needs to be explained across multiple sessions. The playlist structure mirrors the development structure: setup and first level, second level, third level and polish.
Teaching a more complex project also requires more careful sequencing of topics. Some concepts — the trigger system, the lighting setup — appear in multiple levels and need to be introduced once and then referenced rather than re-explained each time. Getting this structure right in the playlist requires thinking about the viewer’s learning arc, not just the technical content.
Reflection
The suspense prototype is the point in this series where Blueprint projects stopped being isolated mechanic experiments and started being complete games. Three levels, a narrative arc, atmosphere built deliberately through lighting and triggers, character animation contributing to presence — these are the elements of a game rather than a demo.
The teaching playlist for this project is also the most fully realized of the three teaching playlists in the series. By this point I had the experience of two previous playlists (SpaceShip game and Endless Runner) to draw on, and the suspension prototype’s greater complexity gave more content to teach. The discipline of explaining three levels worth of design decisions — why each trigger fires when it does, why the lighting is arranged as it is, why the puzzle is placed where it is — produced an unusually thorough documentation of the project’s design intent.
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Nicolás Bertoa 
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