Capstone
Four years of school came down to one project, and the grade was the difference between graduating and not. The Space Between is a psychological horror game built around your heartbeat. The game listens, adapts, and uses your pulse against you through a custom peripheral we built.
I was lead developer and designer. In practice that meant the enemy AI, the player movement, the procedural camera sway, every UI screen, the navigation, the objectives, the music I composed, the SFX I chose, the heart-rate logic, and the website you’re about to click through to. Most of the game’s feel passed through my hands at some point.
The technical side
A boids algorithm for the mimics, which spawn as chairs in places chairs shouldn’t be. Stand near one and it remembers it isn’t a chair. When the monster’s around, they swarm. Real-time custom background blurs in the UI through hand-written shaders. The monster ran two behaviour trees, switching context depending on which side of the world the player was in.
Why horror
Horror has always pulled me in. Not the cheap scares, the slow dread. The feeling that something is slightly wrong. We wanted players to feel watched and to feel their own pulse betray them. I think we got there.
The project got an A, and later took fourth in its category at Level Up in Toronto. A proud way to close out school. The night before the demo, the website wouldn’t render and the build wouldn’t launch. I stayed up until five.