Hi, we’re Raptor Games, we’re a development team from Stafford,UK. We’re developing Project Thanantos, a psychological horror based game for the PC and the Sensics zSight. We’re a team of 5 students from Staffordshire University. This our late but full 2 week blog post. We also have a daily blog on Posterous, links below.

Meet the team

Tom Laird: Environment Artist/Audio Designer (Far Left)

Andy Coles: Lead Programmer/Maths (Left middle)

Alex Shapland: Concept Artist/3D Artist (Middle)

Hugh Laird: Project Lead/Programmer (Right middle)

Tom Kemp: Character Artist/Community Manager (Far Right)

Project Thanatos is a first-person psychological horror game, which throws you into a world of twisted terrors and gripping fear as a plot unravels around the origins of a deadly biochemical weapon. As the story unfolds, the consequences of your actions become apparent and you must escape before time, and your sanity runs out! Players will only have a torch and their wits to help them overcome the obstacles that lie in wait.

In the game you play as Dr Samantha Richards, a bio-weapon researcher who unfortunately has been infected with her latest bio-weapon that causes horrendous hallucinations and memory loss. She must discover a cure and find a way out of the facility but she must be wary as something else also lurks these halls!

Players will be able experience this game with the headset or just on the PC with either the Xbox 360 controller or keyboard and mouse.

We have made huge progress in the past 2 weeks mainly because of the user friendliness of the Sensic zSight headset.

We are well ahead of our development plan and now deciding on adding extra art content to fill the free time that we thought we’d be spending on the headset. We create modular art assets which help speed up level design and we can re-use assets to create consistent, believable and populated scenes. You can fully see our progress in the prototype videos below.

We have changed our game a huge amount in the past 2 weeks especially length wise. We first intended to have the player in game for about 10-15 minutes but after we spoke to Ubireflections and received a much clearer idea of what will happen at Protoplay we decided to heed the advice and cut it down to 5 minutes play time and practically speed up the game a little.

We hope Protoplay will work with our game as horror games heavily rely on immersion, sound and atmosphere and lot of mentors have expressed problems that we might have once we are at the event, one being the noise! We have completely redesigned the level and we think the changes and the new events will help to alleviate some of the problems caused by the noise.

Our iterative development process has allowed us to create a playable prototype each week (Youtube links below) and we think by the end of week 4 we will have a playable game to test and we’ll get everyone to try it once, bring spare underpants.

We have done some preliminary audio recording to get some placeholder sounds in-game which helps to give some more life to the game! We have a plan to start binaural audio recording on the end of week 3 which will just improve the games audio immersion. Every mentor that has experienced it has had nothing but positive feedback. We will be relying heavily on this type of audio to really immerse the player.

Here’s our weekly prototype videos:

Week 1 Prototype Video

Week 2 Prototype Video

Blog - http://raptor-games.posterous.com/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/Dare2012_RG

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/RaptorG

YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB6BC953F7A0E61BD

Tom Kemp

Community Manager

3D Animation