Bedtime Nightmare
About the game
Bedtime Nightmare is a first-person puzzle horror experience for PC that follows the story of a young boy navigating the blurred line between dream and reality.
The protagonist awakens to find his home eerily transformed. Familiar rooms are now cloaked in darkness, inhabited by unsettling presences that lurk in the shadows. As the nights progress, the player must survive by managing light sources, solving environmental puzzles, and uncovering the mystery behind the nightmare that’s slowly consuming his world.
With a strong focus on atmosphere, fear of the unknown, and childhood vulnerability, Bedtime Nightmare delivers an emotional and immersive horror experience grounded in memory, fear, and survival.
Main Features
Light as Your Lifeline
Light is not just a visual element, it’s a survival mechanic. Managing light sources is essential to explore the environment and fend off the dark entities that haunt the shadows.
Reawakening of childhood sensations
The comfort of childhood has been reimagined as terror. What once felt safe.. your room, your toys, the bedtime rituals, now hides something far more sinister. You're no longer playing; you're surviving in the dark.
Gameplay Loop
The Team and My Role
As the programmer of the Unseen Cat Studio team, I entirely wrote the code to bring Bedtime Nightmare to life. My role focused heavily on gameplay programming, UI systems, and the integration of core mechanics.
In Bedtime Nightmare, my main contributions included:
- Light System & Gameplay Balance: I implemented and refined the light-based survival system, where managing household lights impacts gameplay. This mechanic became the central pillar of tension and resource management throughout the experience.
- Enemy AI: I designed and programmed the enemy’s behavior, integrating sight mechanics, light sensitivity, and patrol patterns to create dynamic and unpredictable threats.
- UI Programming: I developed the game’s HUD elements including battery indicators, visual prompts, and tutorial messages, ensuring feedback was clear and thematically consistent.
- Visual Feedback & Animation Hooks: I linked AI states and gameplay events to animations and VFX to enhance immersion and player readability.
- General Systems & Tools: I supported the team by building reusable tools, implementing plugins, fixing bugs, and ensuring smooth interaction between gameplay systems.
Problems Encountered and Solutions
During development, we faced two major technical challenges:
- Struct Compilation & Build Errors: At a certain point, we encountered persistent "Unknown Cook Failure" errors during packaging. After narrowing it down, we discovered the issue was related to modified Structs not being recompiled across all dependent Blueprints, a known Unreal Engine quirk. To resolve this, we implemented a strict rule: after any change to a struct, we manually opened, compiled, and saved all related Blueprints before attempting a new build. This ensured build stability moving forward.
- Integration of the Horror Engine Plugin: Initially, all core systems, lighting, inventory, interaction, had been coded from scratch. Later, we decided to integrate features from the Horror Engine plugin to speed up development and standardize certain mechanics. However, this caused compatibility issues, particularly with overlapping systems. To solve this, we refactored our logic to work with Horror Engine’s architecture where needed, and carefully merged systems to avoid redundancy or conflicts.
