Fearfobia

The game

A roguelike psychological horror game. You enter the fearrooms with nothing, and every room is a randomly drawn phobia. A mental state meter governs how bad it gets — as it drops, the hallucinations start and the whispers get louder. Survive long enough and you escape.

The situation

I joined as the project's first producer. The team was four people, and the design lived almost entirely in scattered chat messages. No single source of truth, no task tracking, and no agreement on what the first playable build needed to contain.

My job was to make the work legible: write down what the game was, decide what shipped first, and give a distributed volunteer team a cadence they could keep while balancing jobs and school.

What I did

Wrote the design document

Authored the GDD, narrative framework, and team roster, consolidating scattered design discussion into one reference the whole team worked from.

Ran weekly task cycles

Set up and maintained a Trello board with named assignees across programming, art, audio, and QA, with published weekly deadlines and visible completion state.

Scaled the team deliberately

Recruited and onboarded artists on a staggered schedule, defining art hierarchy and task segmentation so added capacity didn't become duplicated work.

Tracked production risk

Flagged sole-developer dependency and part-time availability early, and scoped the first build to what the active team could actually finish.

Delivery timeline

MAR 10Joined a four-person team. Proposed a GDD and started writing it.
MAR 13–20First weekly task boards published with named assignees across code, art, and audio.
APR 10itch.io page live and the Android build shipped the same day.
APR 26Store page theming and presentation pass.
MAY 20.1.0b published — playable in browser, plus Windows and Android downloads.
JUN 1Team wound down. Development ended with the public build up.

Four months from scattered chat messages to three platforms with a public build.

Team size

JoinedPeakBuild outWound down

The team tripled and then contracted inside four months. Onboarding that growth without losing consistency, then holding delivery together as people rolled off, was most of the actual production work.

Artifact — weekly task board

TODO BY 3/13

@Keliati

Finish Dealer System
Expand Pillpool
Add More Rooms
Review Bugs

@Ylleelly & @simonkitchen77

Begin sprite overhaul (player + enemies)
Begin environment sprite work (rooms/tiles)
Begin illustration work (menu/key art)

@lanrii & @Leviathan — TODO BY 3/18

Walk sound
Item usage sound
Spider sounds
Whisper that intensifies as mental_state drops

One week of the board, run in Trello. Struck-through items were completed and marked off during that cycle.

Credits

Credited in-game as "Renny."

Screens

Details

Role: Producer
Dates: Mar – Jun 2026
Engine: Godot
Platforms: HTML5, Windows, Android
Team: 4 → 13 → 7
Genre: Roguelike horror

Fearfobia was an unpaid volunteer project. The team wound down in June 2026 with the public build up on itch.io; the project remains marked in development and was not taken further.