FAQ
The short version: the editor works today in your browser, billing is not live yet, and the safety checks are an aid — not a substitute for an inspector.
HauntBuilder is a floor-plan design tool for haunted house owners, escape room creators and seasonal event designers. It combines a drag-and-drop 2D editor on a snapping grid, a first-person 3D walkthrough with dark-lighting simulation, fire-code-aware safety checks, a guest throughput calculator, and printable PDF exports.
An account is needed to save your haunts to the cloud, open them from any device, and manage a Pro subscription. Accounts and cloud saves are coming soon — sign up now to be ready.
Yes — open the app and load the demo. “The Hollow” is a 40×40 ft sample haunt with three rooms, an 8-ft gallery corridor, jump-scare zones, hidden actor runs and a fog-and-strobe FX plot, all wired to the safety validator and walkable in 3D. It loads in one click.
HauntBuilder Pro is $25/month. Checkout is live — click Subscribe to Pro on the landing page to start your subscription.
Three kinds of export: JSON project files (the full layout, for backups and restoring work), BOM JSON (auto-counted material lists — flats, fasteners, doors and zone-grouped electrical drops), and vector PDFs with two presets — Building Inspector (fire-code corridor annotations) and Actor Training (scare and FX symbols).
No — and it does not try to. The safety validator flags corridor widths under 3.5 ft (measured wall-to-wall) and dead-end or sealed rooms with no egress route, and the walkthrough warns on headroom. That is an aid for catching problems early, not a substitute for a licensed inspector or your local code official.
Yes. One click switches the canvas from 2D to a first-person 3D walkthrough: walls extrude to 8 ft with distinct materials for solid, curtain, chain-link and plexiglass, doors become walkable openings, and the lighting simulates the real dark experience — a visibility slider, dimmer nodes as dimmable point lights, flashing strobes, scene fog and a camera flashlight. Line-of-sight probes and scare-angle readouts help you tune placement.
Yes, two ways today: export the project as JSON and send the file, or open the app with a share link — layouts loaded through a ?project= link hydrate straight into the editor. Cloud-saved share links are coming with accounts and cloud saves.
A current desktop browser — recent Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari. The 3D walkthrough uses WebGL and is best with a keyboard and mouse (WASD movement plus mouse-look, with an orbit control fallback).
The editor is responsive: on narrow screens the palette and properties panels become slide-in drawers with backdrops, and the toolbar wraps instead of clipping. Desktop keeps the full three-pane layout, which is the recommended way to work — and the 3D walkthrough is designed for a keyboard and mouse.