For my third completed game, I set out with a goal to keep it simple. Just before starting, I was experimenting with an open-source AI image generator called Fooocus. I highly recommend checking it out: GitHub – lllyasviel/Fooocus: Focus on prompting and generating. Inspired by the AI-generated visuals, I decided to create a small horror game that would leverage them. The concept took shape as a hidden image horror game—think of it as a darker, race-against-the-clock version of “Where’s Waldo,” where you must find the lurking creature before it finds you.
What I thought would be a quick project to hone my 2D game skills turned into something much larger. Despite the images being AI-generated, producing them was time-consuming because the tool runs on my computer’s GPU. Many images came out with odd features, especially the eyes, requiring manual editing in GIMP. I spent months perfecting the images and strategically hiding the creature.
After building the visual content, I tackled the code, facing an endless string of bugs. A significant challenge was tracking image variations—about 27 in total—to avoid repeating any within a match. I grouped the images alphabetically, where variations of the same image shared a group. This grouping helped streamline random selection, but implementing it took time due to unexpected issues, like game objects not activating properly, which caused animation glitches and crashes.
Once the code was finally working, another hurdle appeared: a build error that only surfaced upon publishing. Strangely, a null reference buried in my asset code—unrelated to the UI—caused all my menu elements to overlap, and the credits screen bled red streaks down the display. Adding error handling fixed the issue, and the game finally worked as intended.
Midway through the project, my wife and I welcomed our beautiful daughter, which extended the development time beyond the few months I had anticipated. Altogether, the project took over eight months to complete, but I’m proud of how it turned out. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed bringing it to life!
p.s that’s my face, poorly edited on one of them. (You can see why I added film grain..)
Home Screen
This is the image used for the main menu. It is actually a still image, but in the game it looks to be moving. I achieved this by using some image editing tools to make it come to life.
Before
AI can be pretty nifty, and it’s remarkable it can do this. One thing it can struggle with though is faces. 99% of the images came out looking off like you see here. This required rerunning the image and touching up the faces one by one.
After
On a photo with only 4 people rerunning it 4 times was not too bad. It would take about a half hour or so to get a nice high-quality one done.
Images with up to 20 people, however… that was painful.
The creature
For some of the images, the creature needed to peak over things. I was able to get a cool image of it peeking over something, but I couldn’t get the hands right. For that, I had to add a little personal touch to it.
It's Hand's
The personal touch is my hands… I edited my hands on it.
Magnifying
Fun fact, when it is used on an image in the game it isn’t actually zooming in. There are two images, a small image and a large image. The large image is hidden and only visible through the glass to achieve the desired effect.