Starting a new project is always exciting, maybe because it’s the most pure a project will ever be. A primordial base-state from which all things are again possible. This is perhaps also why destruction is equally exciting, it’s an often cataclysmic return to that state of infinite potential.

Ben and I are both techno heads and after working on Salaryman which is a bright and happy game, we both felt like we wanted to sink our teeth into something darker, both with the music and also visualy. It’s with that in mind that we embark head first on a week-long jam into a decidedly dark techno VR shooter.

Ben is the audio engineer on the UWU team and I’m normally more technical director, we really want this game to be a collaboration between the tech and the music. From the tech side I really want to push whats possible visually in VR today, specifically with lighting. This means choosing render options that normally might have to be skipped for performance reasons. With that in mind we are prepared to make sacrifices in terms of modeling and textures in order to bring the framerate back up to an acceptable level. The other aspect of the tech side is the music. In our preliminary discussions we really wanted the music to progress with you through the gameplay, so to do that we first identified different techniques of transitioning, triggering, and progressing the music and the soundscape.

The concept is based around finding your way through a dark, abstract world by finding light, focusing and modifying it through consumable lenses and crystals. Simple in concept so that we can focus more of our limited time on the sound design and integration.

This is the first concept art I drew up for the game, we then took it to employee-of-the-minute, midjourney, to try and get a general mood to help guide the music and level design:

This is of course where we run into our first technical limitations regarding lighting in VR. A personal goal is to get the lighting and reflections looking like this… I’ll check in tomorrow with how well that went so wish us luck.

Until then, keep your lenses focused.

• Oliver