Role: Lead Designer
Platforms: Google Daydream VR
Developer: The Chinese Room
Publisher: Google
Released: 2017
Deep below the ice in Polar City, everyone is asleep. Up on the surface of Kenopsia, the Custodians are busy making a world. For the next four million years they will be creating a paradise for the sleepers; living machines made to
sculpt a perfect garden. Custodian 98 wakes and starts its job, working alongside its friend Drone to create clouds, tend the ecosystem, measure the rain. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, 98 and the rest of the
Custodians gently prepare Kenopsia for the wakening. Until the day a new star is spotted in the sky and everything changes.
Travel through the world of Kenopsia, exploring incredible places from swamps to mountains, oceans
and cities. Learn to work and play with Drone to discover the world and uncover a powerful story of friendship, a tale passed down the generations, from adult to child. It’s a story about love and duty, and about the wonder of
caring for things and helping them grow. It’s a story about a world being created and about a machine who is left all alone and goes looking for his friends.
So Let Us Melt is a story-driven game by the creators of Dear
Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The Chinese Room have built a reputation as one of the most exciting storytelling game studios of their generation and this is their first VR experience.
We were approached by Google to make a game for a new VR device (Daydream) that they were preparing to launch. After prototyping a bunch of ideas, we hit on the idea of a story about the building of a planet over millions of years.
Along the way we hit the usual technical issues that happen with any new platform, but that basic premise remained throughout.
This was my first complete UE project. I really enjoyed the speed at which we could try
new ideas and then discuss if they needed to be coded or if they could remain as Blueprints.