The next game is called SOOM: It Hears You. In Korean, soom (숨) is breath, and soom-da (숨다) is to hide. Holding your breath and hiding live in the same word.
When I was small, a blanket was enough to make hiding fun. I truly believed you must never let a foot hang out from under the covers, and I never looked too long at the space under the bed or at a wardrobe door left slightly open. Nobody ever told me what was in there, which made it worse. I wanted to make a game that gets you off the screen for a while and lets you play like that again.
So the stage is your actual room. Something is in the house. I have not decided what it is. It could be one of the infected, it could be a ghost, it could be the thing you were sure lived under your bed. Only one thing is certain: it hears you. The hiding places are the ones people really use — under the covers, under the bed, inside the wardrobe. Hiding alone gets dull, so there is always somewhere you need to go. The first one I thought of: get a bowl from the kitchen without being noticed.
Outside, the aim is that you never walk while staring at your phone. You look ahead, you listen, and now and then you glance at a small radar to see roughly where it is. One idea I am weighing is that the light of your screen can give you away, so the less you look, the better.
One rule was settled from the start. The microphone only measures how loud things are. It does not record, and it sends nothing anywhere. All the game needs to know is whether you stayed quiet.
Development has started, and I mean to polish it into a release. The iPhone version comes first. There is no date yet. First I want to find out whether it is truly frightening in a real room.