The Scuttlefoot

"Remember the monster under your bed? The suffocating dread you felt when your parents flicked off the lights and left you alone in the dark? The long, sleepless nights spent wondering if you would make it until morning? It's back."

I've spent the last few months working on something special: my first virtual reality project! The Scuttlefoot is an interactive experience designed for Oculus Rift. 

This is the biggest, most complex project I've worked on to date. It took myself and four other designers almost half a year to create. None of us had ever worked with VR before. As I mentioned previously, I've had a rocky history when it comes to 3-D game development, so I was a bit apprehensive to take on a project this complex. The rest of my team, on the other hand, was hellbent to work with Oculus. Caving to peer pressure, I gritted my teeth, and gave it the ol' college try.

At its core, The Scuttlefoot is a horror story about a child coming face-to-face with the monster in her closet. We decided early on that this wouldn't be a game per se (games have winners). All we wanted to viewer to do was watch and hope the monster wasn't hungry. 

We built the project using Unreal Engine because it had easy VR integration. Since none of us were especially great programmers, we had to keep our code simple (The Scuttlefoot is basically a series of time-triggered animations). But we did manage to develop a cool "look-detection" system: the monster skitters away from the viewer's sight, and lurks at the peripherals of their vision. That alone added a lot of tension and dynamism to the final product.

The team, hard at work in a cramped apartment. Green shirts mandatory.

If you own an Oculus, why not give The Scuttlefoot a download, and let us know what you think? Like I said, this was our first foray into VR, but it probably won't be our last.