Hotel 77 is a first-person narrative horror game from Ludomancer Studio, set in a haunted hotel caught in a time loop. Players walk its shifting corridors, spot what is wrong, and have to make the right choice to move time forward.

The team had about ten people, and the game is localized into ten languages with full English audio.

Level design. In the first pass I built and polished several of the hotel’s rooms, including the Outlast room, the skull room and the dark room, added locked doors, and placed the carpets and the letter. My level design branch was merged in January 2025.

In the second pass I designed and built all of the hotel’s bedrooms, starting from the basic bedroom. The bedroom is the same behind all 8 doors, so players don’t have to memorize much. Only one door in the hallway is unlocked, so they don’t have to check all 8 either. The unlocked door is random, except when the anomaly is in a bedroom: then that bedroom always spawns behind the same door.

Anomalies. I created 17 anomaly variants and 4 themed room variants across both passes. In the hallways, mine include blood handprints around the fire alarm, luggage turned into coffins, a dead ghost sitting at the start of the hallway, GET OUT written across the wall, statues that turn to watch you, a skull inside a diver helmet, and Nevermore, where the same helmet hides a bloody raven. In the bedrooms, they include a bloody bathtub, an evil TV, a hole in the wardrobe, a lamp that is simply wrong, and a crying zombie.

To me, a good anomaly rewards paying attention. It doesn’t try to jumpscare you hard. You get a little scared when you realize what’s wrong with the room. Some of mine are obvious and scary on purpose, and some are really hard to spot. I always added a black substance near the anomaly, to make it a tiny bit easier to see and to give all of them a shared motif. When an anomaly is a jumpscare, it should feel unique. In my Outlast room, the power goes out partway through and your night vision switches on by itself.

My favorite is the shadow man, in my dark room. The lights are off and a huge shadow stands at the far end, looking at you. It gives an immediate “oh no” feeling without being a jumpscare. Walk toward it, and the lights come back on and it’s gone.

Not every anomaly made it. Each one went through review, and two of mine were cut. A shadow hiding behind the luggage, given away only by its breathing, was too hard to spot. A door left ajar with a baby crying behind it overlapped with another developer’s crying baby.

Anomaly behaviors. I wrote eight scripts to bring the anomalies to life: objects and heads that turn to face the player, triggers that fire when the player gets close, props that vanish on approach or after a timer, a random door unlocker, a rotation reset trigger, and a manager for the lamp anomaly.