Decaylight Studios is an independent horror studio. Our first game is Signal Rot — four-player co-op horror where a buried archive hunts the crew using their real microphones, and learns to rebuild them out of what it hears.
We are interested in one thing: what happens when a game genuinely pays attention to the people playing it. Not a scripted jump, not a difficulty curve — a system that takes real input from real players and gives it back changed.
No creature ever reads a player position. They perceive through one interface that answers with where something was, stamped and decaying, and every answer has to pass a physical test first. This is enforced by a build step called SenseAudit, which fails the build if any creature looks a player up — it caught a violation in our own code the first time it ran.
The sound model reads real voice from a real microphone. Speech is a resource, silence is a resource, and both of them are dangerous — one creature hunts noise and another forms in rooms that have been quiet too long.
Recorded speech is replayed back at the crew later, in the voice it was taken from. The learning ladder is fixed and has to be earned: sound, then speech, then individuals, then voices, then relationships, then habits, then predictions.
Players get frighteningly competent through equipment, understanding and teamwork. They never become wizards who can comfortably kill anything. Vulnerability is the whole horror.
Players are colourful, expressive and ridiculous. The world stays serious, tactile, dirty and oppressive. If both halves are goofy it is forgettable. If both are grim it is exhausting.
Salvage a dead relay station at night. The things down there hunt by sound — your actual microphone. When you die you do not stop playing, you become the static. And one of you was already infected before the shift began.
The tomb is the machine. The monsters are parts of the machine. The players are its training data.
Signal Rot · core fantasy
Each one is built to make the crew question one thing: light and fire, sound, trust, greed. None of them is ever handed your position — they perceive through a single interface that answers with where something was, and a build step fails the build if any creature tries to look a player up.
The Black Receiver · The Jackal Judge
Three and a half metres, verified at runtime against a 3.4–3.6 m spec band, carrying a was-sceptre attached to his right hand at 2.9 m. He hunts through a dedicated heat field that holds two different things: live sources, which can be tracked continuously, and residue, a fading memory of where heat used to be.
So a lit torch draws him. A snuffed torch leaves a cooling trail he follows into an empty room. A torch dropped on the floor is a thing he walks to and stands over while its owner leaves.
Studios usually publish the finished half. This is the whole list, reconciled against our own build documents. If a system is not written yet, it says so here and it stays disabled in the build.
| Area | State | |
|---|---|---|
| Single-player prototypeMenu, settings, wardrobe, pause and respawn, salvage and quota loop, working flashlight. | Built | Menu, settings, wardrobe, pause and respawn, salvage and quota loop, working flashlight. |
| Sound modelNoiseField and the sensory foundation the whole design rests on. | Built | NoiseField and the sensory foundation the whole design rests on. |
| Monster rosterFour creatures modelled, rigged, animated and hunting. Correctly scaled. | Built | Four creatures modelled, rigged, animated and hunting. Correctly scaled. |
| Steam integrationSteamworks initialises successfully. | Built | Steamworks initialises successfully. |
| Standard Recovery RookClay rebuild in progress and not yet approved. It gates the art pipeline. | In build | Clay rebuild in progress and not yet approved. It gates the art pipeline. |
| Lobbies and networked playFishNet and Steam relay work is open. Host and Join stay disabled in the build until they actually work. | In build | FishNet and Steam relay work is open. Host and Join stay disabled in the build until they actually work. |
| Proximity voicePhase 2. Depends on networking landing first. | Specified | Phase 2. Depends on networking landing first. |
| Voice mimicryPhase 3. The signature mechanic, and the first thing after voice. | Specified | Phase 3. The signature mechanic, and the first thing after voice. |
Press kits, capsule assets and build access on request. We answer everything ourselves — there is nobody else here to forward it to.