Dare Blogs – Raptor Games

Hi, I’m Tom Kemp and I’m the character artist and animator for Raptor Games. We’re developing Project Thanatos, a psychological horror game for the PC and the Sensics zSight headset! Our team members come from all over the country but we all attended Staffordshire University together.

Project Thanatos is a first-person psychological horror game set in the CypherTech Research Facility, which the player has to escape whilst avoiding the terrors that lurk the halls. Unfortunately the character has been infected with a biochemical pathogen, with one of the side effects being dark and twisted hallucinations!

The Sensics zSight provides players stereoscopic 3D visuals with full head-tracking movement which gives complete in-game visual freedom. The headset combined with binaural sound recording provides the immersion to make this horror experience truly terrifying.

The game can be played on the PC with or without the headset as we want to show that this game is playable without a $12,000 peripheral!

There has been talk of Sony, Valve, Bethesda and Crytek being interested in VR headsets for gaming purposes, with John Carmack also developing a headset for the consumer market, so hopefully you’ll be seeing more games developed for headsets in the future.

Dare has been an interesting and challenging experience. We have met some really awesome people in the other teams and meeting like-minded people is always fun.

The mentors have been a real asset to the project by helping with design choices and giving feedback. But it’s been very challenging getting a title from concept to a game in nine weeks, but it is the perfect way to learn about the industry and how to make games. I can’t recommend it enough.

Dare has been a massive learning experience for the team as most of us have never worked in such a tight-knit group before so we’ve learnt about – and put into practice – project development cycles and communication with other areas of the development pipeline.

It has also been a great learning experience individually for each team member as we have all added to and improved our skillset just by working hard for nine weeks straight!

The mentors have been a big help as they have taught us to look at situations with a different eye and to test everything with other people rather than yourself because your personal view is distorted.

ProtoPlay is our biggest challenge yet as our game relies heavily on atmosphere, sound and immersion, all of which can be destroyed at ProtoPlay but we’re ready to tackle this challenge together.

We have thought heavily on the subject and we have taken measures to help the player experience the game how it’s supposed to be played.

At the moment we are concentrating on the game and we’re focusing on giving the audience at ProtoPlay, and anyone who downloads the game, a really awesome experience. Anything that comes after that is a bonus for us!

You can follow Raptor Games on Twitter @Dare2012_RG and Facebook to learn more about their game.

Dare ProtoPlay and Indie Fest will take place on 10th-12th August in Dundee, with all 15 Dare student games on show, as well as indie games, conference talks and much more.

More information can be found on the official Dare ProtoPlay website.