Light of Mine

Title: Lead Designer

Role: Game Designer/Lead Level Designer/Scripter

Company: nonPareil Institute

Platform: VR, PC

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Light of Mine is a VR horror game where you must carry a candle through an abandoned cathedral while avoiding statues that come to life. The catch is that the statues only move when you don't look at them.

Our company received a vive from Valve as so we could test it out but we had a problem in that we didn't have any animators available at the time. So what do you do? You make a game that has none. Our modelers posed the statue models in several scary poses and whenever one would come into view, we would swap between them, creating the illusion of movement.

I also attempted to design a VR control scheme that would keep nausea to a minimum. The main problem we found was sudden stopping and starting had people ripping the headset off within minutes. I implemented a system that used the vive thumb track pads for movement. Since it was analog, one could ease from fully stopped to walking by strafing in the middle of the track pad and moving it out to the edge.

Light of Mine released in 2017 and is out on Steam now.

Technical Details

Read on for more details about my work on Light of Mine

This game was during the initial release of the first generation of HTC Vive and I wanted to try and crack the "no nausea nut" when it came to control schemes. We didn't want to use teleport which was the "go to" solution at the time to sidestep the issue. We couldn't use a thumbstick or a button because the acceleration was too sudden We then had to figure out how to minimize motion sickness. What ended up being the most effective was only allowing the player to move forward and back, and the character's movement direction was guided by the player's head. We found that the best way to tie the player's movement to those of the character, and when the player was forced to rotate in the direction they wanted to travel,

I happened up on a perfect set of nodes that track when an object is out of the player's view frustrum. This led me to try to make the red light green light mechanic found in those classic Dr. Who villains the weeping angels. They would only come to life and move when not observed. In this case the ai is trying to get to the player but when out of the player's view I just turn off their movement abilities. I also add effects like glowing red eyes that get more intense the longer you let them move unobserved. If you are caught, the world goes dark and the horrible vissage of the statue looms over you.

The candle was one of the primary mechanics of the game. By getting different colors of flame you could unlock different parts to the temple. Since you can literally bring it right up to your face, it needed to look realistic. I found a really nice flame sprite, then I added rotational lerping depending on the current velocity and orientation of the flame. I even put a sub surface scattering on the candle itself so the light of the candle shines through where the wax is thin.