David Delseray

The Light on the Rock is a Narrative Lovecraftian horror game where the player embodies a lighthouse keeper stranded in the middle of a sea full of monsters and who has to make dire decisions to survive and remain sane, each one of his decisions having an impact on the story sooner or later.
You could see it as Firewatch taking place in a Lovecraft novel.

The game is for PC, PS4, XBox One, Switch and possibly VR.

I worked on this project for 7 months mostly on my own, being all at the same time Designer, Programmer, Writer, 3D modeler, Animator and creative director.  After these 7 months, I have reached a proof of concept prototype of 3 chapters and 20 minutes of gameplay.

My biggest challenge was to be able to put up the whole game following my main intentions of creating an ambient horror rather than using gore or jump scares and make it so that each choice faced by the player is meaningful.

For the ambient horror I created the whole level design in such way that everything would look hostile and monstrous with gargantuan threatening rocks and the lighthouse designed to look like an evil giant. Besides, all along the game, the events occurring get scarier every time and isolate the character, making him more vulnerable. As the days go by, the threat gets bigger and closer.

To make the choices more meaningful, I built the whole tree of choices and the whole storyline so that all of the player’s decisions, as small as they may be, have an impact on the short and long term. Usually if a decision brings a solution for an immediate problem, it creates bigger trouble later on. This way, the player is forced to ponder and consider his options even when the situation is an emergency.

On the technical side, my main concern was to make systems in such a way that they were all at the same time easy to use (make the systems as automated as possible but giving me enough levers to tweak them if needed) and optimized so that they are not too heavy on resources. In that matter, I have spent the most time codding, tweaking and iterating on the systems of events (basically the manager taking care of triggering the events of the different chapters) and the dialogue manager (the blueprint ensuring that all the dialogues are played at the right time, with the right subtitle and, in a perfect world, the right sound).

I also had to learn how to use Blender to create 3D models, animations and export it all in UE4. Obviously, it was all for place holders that would give the player an idea of what is what and how it works. I don’t pretend that anything I created was final.

I had to conduct a recruitment process to select the perfect sound designer to work with me on the game.

Finally, I had to create the trailer of the game (available here) and collaborate with the sound designer to edit the video in the best way possible.

Get the build of the game.

Artwork by Pauline Sion.