The Filter is a unique horror-adjacent experience that is like a spookier and less politically poignant version of Papers, Please, where you play as an employee of a screening facility rooting out threats posed by clients that have passed through a dimensional rift. Using a number of tools, as well as by questioning the suspect individuals, you must divine what symptoms they are exerting, and what threats they pose, if any. Be warned though; symptoms on their own can often be a harmless side effect of traveling through the “Smeld”, and the resulting company damages that may occur due to false positives will come out of your paycheck.

I made the Filter over the course of a week with a small team for the 2024 Scream TV jam, a horror themed jam with the theme of “The Screen.” We decided to interpret this as a “screening process” imagined in a horror environment. Being my first released 3d game, as well as a new experience for my team members, a lot of development time went to figuring implementation details and program eccentricities, but given the circumstances and time frame I think we managed to piece together a decent experience. There are some aspects I’d like to flesh out a bit more, and some features that were created but didn’t make it into the final build that I’d like to implement, so I might be revisiting this project in the future.

You can check the game out on itch.io, or peruse my team’s code on GitHub! Be warned, there’s some panic code in there, it being a game jam game after all.