Cursebreakers

Break the Curse, Escape the Mansion

Game Overview

Cursebreakers is a first-person multiplayer horror game built around shifting trust and betrayal. A group of players explore a procedurally generated haunted manor, solving puzzles, navigating traps, and gathering tools to escape. As players explore, their actions unknowingly build toward a breaking point, at which point the mansion’s curse activates and one player is transformed into a terrifying monster known as the Cursed Host.

Once the curse is revealed, the game pivots from cooperation to asymmetrical conflict. The remaining Cursebreakers must complete a randomized objective to break the curse and escape, while the Cursed Host uses unique supernatural abilities to locate, sabotage, and eliminate them. With three different possible Host types, and randomized objectives and mansion layouts, no two matches unfold the same way.

Cursebreakers emphasizes tension, unpredictability, and a deliberate shift from teamwork to conflict, creating high-stakes moments driven by player behavior and social paranoia.

Development

Cursebreakers is currently in active development. If you would like to learn more about my role in the project, read on below! But note that all images and videos below are from a project that is in development and subject to change.

As the project’s Lead Gameplay and Systems Designer, I was responsible for establishing core systems, designing various room types to be generated within the mansion, prototyping and iterating on systems based on player feedback, fine-tuning various values, and maintaining the design document.

As the lead designer, I was responsible for establishing the following systems:

Core Game Loop

1. Game Start

The game features an in-game lobby that allows players to create or join sessions, customize their characters, and view the player tutorial. The lobby is laid out with a few secret areas built to establish the game’s theme and story.

2. Exploration Phase

In the Exploration Phase, players act as a cooperative team navigating the mansion while advancing towards the game’s betrayal moment. During this phase, players:

• Explore the mansion room by room
  • Players move through a procedurally generated manor, uncovering new rooms and gradually filling out their personal map as they traverse the space.
• Gather and manage equipment
  • Players search rooms for items that can aid survival later, such as healing potions and teleportation scrolls.
• Solve environmental challenges
  • Certain rooms contain puzzles, traps, or obstacles that require observation, coordination, or careful movement to overcome.
• Interact with cursed rooms and items
  • Entering specific rooms or picking up cursed objects can trigger a Curse Check, which is a dice roll that advances the game toward the Curse Phase.
• Build the Curse Value
  • Player actions during exploration increase the mansion’s Curse Value, which increases the likelihood that the Curse will activate as a result of a Curse Check.

3. Curse Phase

Once the curse is triggered, the game shifts from cooperative exploration to an asymmetrical conflict. During the Curse Phase:

• One player becomes the Cursed Host
  • A single player is selected and transformed into a supernatural creature (The Werebeast, the Scarecrow, or the Entity) gaining unique abilities to use in eliminating the other players.
• Roles and objectives are revealed asymmetrically
  • The Cursed Host learns their curse type, abilities, and objective, while the remaining Cursebreakers receive a shared objective focused on breaking the curse and escaping.
• Cursebreakers race to complete a randomized objective
  • Players must locate key rooms, gather or use specific items, and perform coordinated actions (such as destroying altars or assembling ritual components) before being eliminated.
• The Cursed Host hunts and sabotages
  • The Host actively stalks the mansion, using movement, damage, and sensing abilities to track players, disrupt objectives, and isolate targets.

4. Curse Resolution

Once the Curse Phase has started, both sides race to complete their win condition, with the Cursebreakers attempting to finish their assigned objective and escape the mansion while the Cursed Host attempts to hunt and eliminate them. A single game of Cursebreakers resolves when at least one surviving Cursebreaker breaks the curse and escapes the mansion, or when all Cursebreakers are eliminated before they complete their objective.

House Generation

Cursebreakers uses a pre-procedural house generation system that combines authored room types with constraint-based layout generation. Critical rooms (entrance, exit, objectives) are placed at the beginning of generation, with each room having their own restrictions on spacing and distance, before the rest of the surrounding mansion is generated to create varied paths and dead ends.

Once the layout of the mansion is generated, the mansion is further populated with various items that can aid players with the exploration of the mansion, communication between survivors, or locating key objectives, or defending against the Curse’s Host.

Networking

Cursebreakers is networked through a combination of Steamworks and a handcrafted system. Steamworks.NET is an api that ports Steamworks to Unity and allows for messages to be sent over the network between client and host (server). Actual message information and response are all controlled through a custom-made networking solution. This system uses snapshots that store data, which can be used to access and compare data from each client and the server to appropriately fix any issues that arise in the network.

Prototyping

I led the rapid prototyping across Cursebreakers’ core systems, using iteration and playtesting to validate ideas early and refine them into mechanics that fit well into our game. Prototypes were built with a focus on modularity and extensibility, allowing the team to explore risky concepts while maintaining forward momentum in development.

Key prototyping efforts included:

• Curse Trigger and Curse Value mechanics, which were iterated on to balance tension and unpredictability.
• Asymmetric role transitions, prototyping the shift from cooperative exploration to adversarial play to ensure the moment of betrayal felt clear and dramatic, while also ensuring the Cursed Host’s monstrous abilities felt fun both to use and play against.
• Procedural house generation tools, testing different constraint rules and room layouts and compositions to tune a match’s pacing and build-up of tension.
• Various moment-to-moment interactions, including movement, item usage, and puzzle interactions, with frequent adjustments based on playtest feedback to improve their impact and feel.