The Early Stages

Shadow Point is almost here, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to document a few of the more mind-bending aspects of developing Coatsink’s VR puzzler. Spoiler-free, of course. I’m not a savage.

Coatsink conceived Shadow Point in Autumn 2017 on four core pillars:

1. To constantly subvert the player’s expectations through gameplay and narrative.
2. To make full use of ‘six degrees of freedom’ for an experience that can only work in VR.
3. To be a great puzzle game, with an intuitive and open approach, allowing players to tackle challenges at their own pace.
4. Finally, to tell a brilliant story.

The first task on our suddenly massive to-do list was to devise an arena – a place to ‘subvert expectations.’ Immediately the science fiction and psychological horror genres seemed an obvious start. It’s easy to imagine an underground lab causing tears in the fabric of reality, or a terrifying descent through the mind of a madman. But we’ve seen plenty of games (and movies and TV shows) using these motifs, and VR certainly has competition for stellar horror experiences. We wanted to create something different.

Instead, we aimed to inspire wonder. A relaxing experience full of beautiful vistas, mystery and charming characters. A mind-bending world, sure, but one to enjoy at your leisure. The concept of a mountaintop observatory being a portal to another realm was among the initial ideas, with the art team free to imagine what that ‘other realm’ might be:

The Protagonist

For my part (Jon, Narrative Designer, hi) this meant devising a story which could be experienced in any order. Not to sound glib, but the thing about great stories is that events tend to unfold in a specific sequence. Early drafts saw the player ‘solving’ the story as a puzzle, until we realised this dampened its emotional impact. The solution was to keep events linear but make the order optional and the chronology clear, so players could grasp the significance of past events even if they hadn’t discovered them yet.

The second writing hurdle was ensuring the player-character (Alex Burkett) was active in the story. While the initial hook of Shadow Point is a straightforward mystery – What happened to Lorna McCabe? – I was keen for the player to be more than simply a detective piecing together the past. Instead, I wanted them to have a meaningful involvement in the on-going action – to be the agent of change: a protagonist.

This meant Alex needed their own characterisation, with a life and family and goals, which is difficult stuff to convey in VR and can risk detaching the player from their virtual selves. The solutions we employed impacted everything from the dialogue to the puzzle design: despite interacting with others throughout the story, the player-character cannot speak; despite mirrors being a recurring puzzle component, the player never sees their reflection.

Of course, playing with your reflection is just one of multiple mind-bending puzzle mechanics Shadow Point employs and tutorialising these different aspects was not always easy:

Animating Characters

Finally, the animation schedule. Because we wanted to hand-animate the important story sequences, chunks of dialogue needed to be recorded over a year in advance, which felt akin to shooting the chase scenes for a movie before you’ve written the script:

However, this approach allowed Coatsink’s animation team enough time to hand-craft nearly a dozen sequences. I asked our Animation Director about the hurdles.

To close, it’s been a blast working on Shadow Point and, personally, I can’t wait to see what fans of the Oculus Quest and Rift platform make of this mind-bending mystery-puzzler…

Perhaps something they never expect.