Overview
This project was a “palate cleanser” for Introversion—a design experiment built under intentionally enormous time constraints. I covered all level construction duties, including mesh modeling, blocking spaces, decorating, and fleshing them out to shippable quality. This project was a joy to work on—the audience loved it, and it inspired the creation of a sub-genre of similar LiDAR-themed horror titles.
The premise for Scanner Sombre is simple. Players find themselves at the bottom of a massive system of caves, stranded in complete darkness. With nothing but a LIDAR scanner to reveal the space around them, they must stumble through the dark to escape. But everything is not as it seems, and a deeper, darker narrative may be at play…
I loved working on Scanner Sombre. It was a thrill to work under such interesting constraints and with such a thoughtfully calibrated starting point. The concept for the game came from Introversion’s Chris Delay. Building the game around the simple concept of revealing the world through the lens of the LIDAR scanner allowed us to build the game incredibly quickly. I was able to build a large variety of spaces around a number of themes and settings in a very fast fashion - we could focus simply on building the entire game’s geo out at a very reasonable level of detail without the need for textures, lighting and other visual effects. As the game progresses players travel through a variety of different spaces, from abandoned mining tunnels, a raft ride though an underwater river system illuminated by bioluminescent moss, and the eerie remnants of a mysterious cult.
Chris and I worked back and forth daily, riffing on each other’s work and pushing the game forward as fast as we could. I would work from short briefs for each chapter of the game, and we worked linearly on the game’s progression from start to finish, which is quite unusual but was the right fit for this project. Our process felt very free and improv-like. I enjoyed building spaces with only a vague shared idea with Chris about what sorts of moments would occur in them. This worked well with our goal of creating mystery and uncertainty in the player. Chris would then take spaces I’d built, and inject them with small scripted moments or flourishes of experiential variety (such as one sequence based on the “floor is lava” concept, where players must carefully chart a course between islands in a shallow lake while being chased by crazed spectres if they touch the water).
We quickly built up a healthy level of trust for each other’s work, and were able to flesh the game out incredibly quickly. I worked on the game for around 3 months, and Chris spent a little extra time polishing the game before ship. I think total project time was something like 5 months. The game is generally 2 to 3 hours long. The game exceeded Introversion’s expectations in terms of sales and audience reaction, which is very satisfying.
