Case 05 · Product design & art direction · original VR IP
Wrong Room
an interface read under pressure — now running on the headset.
77
dev sessions logged
537
automated tests, green
90
fps on Quest 3 hardware
2,000
simulated matches per balance pass
01 · The product
A 1v1 psychological-tension game read instantly, under stress, with no tutorial and no HUD.
The question the game asks slowly flips from “what did they do to me?” to “what did I do to them?” — and everything in the room is also the interface: game state lives in the world, never in an overlay.
- Premise
- Wake amnesiac in a motel room. Two collectors. One revolver.
- Loop
- Explore the room → duel at the table → a memory unlocks.
- Cast
- Él never speaks · Ella never stops
- Ending
- Ten memories. The tenth turns the TVs on.
Tension must stay usable
Fear is the product; confusion is a bug.
Colour is a rule, not a mood
Warm is yours, cold is outside pressure, red is damage. No exceptions.
Comfort beats cinematic tricks
Anything that hurts legibility or comfort in-headset gets cut.
02 · Product decisions
The senior work was not adding features — it was deciding what the game protects, teaches and refuses. The best decisions weren’t in the original plan.
Decision 01 · Not in the original design
Locomotion became character
The game split in two: explore the room standing, duel seated at the table. Every switch broke reach and comfort — and “you can’t move” read as arbitrary, not designed.
A motorised wheelchair becomes the game’s only locomotion: always seated, everything in reach, movement itself part of the fiction.
One object fixed comfort, unified both phases of the game and wrote backstory — the chair is lore, set dressing and controls at once.
Comfort + lore, one object
Decision 02
An honest comfort rating
Snap-turn ships as an option; the game keeps a ‘Moderate’ rating it can defend instead of gaming the label.
Cert review · decision 2026-07-16
Decision 03
The core move nobody understood
Self-aim on a blank earns the extra turn — taught by watching Él do it first. A cold tester finally explained the rule back.
Strongest balance lever · 74.2% → 68.6%
Decision 04
The story rewrote the economy
A lore decision killed the loot, so debt was resignified as score: same arithmetic reversed, zero balance code touched.
No test went red
03 · The visual system, documented
Palette · 6 core, dirty but legible
Pitch
#1A1C14
Base dark, never pure black
Soot
#2E2F22
Cel-shade shadow band
Mold
#4A5235
Walls, floor, room props
Decay
#7A8A52
Raking highlight on Mold
Bone
#C4AA6B
Light, UI accent, the coin
Ash
#E8E0CC
Text, toon outlines, never pure white
Tints · ≤ 10% of the frame · colour carries the story
Lamp
warm = yours
Cold
cold = from outside
Blood
red = damage only
Signal
the traffic light through the window
Warm is yours, cold is what comes from outside, red is damage — never told, always learned.
Type · brutal display vs. cold mono
ÉL NO HABLA.
ELLA NO CALLA.
● 200 · turno: oponente · cargas: 2 reales · 4 fogueo
Bebas Neue · Share Tech Mono
The cast, as brand voices
Él never speaks. Ella never stops. Silhouette, palette role and staging carry the personality — same job as a brand voice: say who you are before you say a word.
Light does the storytelling — same room, two states, and the interface must read in both.
Mood tiles · environment / characters / UI · directed in Claude Design from the locked system
04 · What got cut
The screen-movie look died on contact with the real interface.
“Amber = active danger”
Replaced by the three-way colour semantic.
Aesthetic vignette
Fights comfort, eats the frame. Functional feedback only.
Film grain in post
Shimmers in-headset; the texture carries the grain instead.
Chromatic aberration
Cinematic in a still, discomfort in use.
Rule zero: no visual decision is final until it's seen in the real interface.
05 · Product keyframes → build
Key moments designed as stills first — each frame a spec the build now has to live up to.
Gameplay mode
The table is the interface
Revolver as game state, items in reach. Everything reads seated — there is no HUD to fall back on.
0 overlays · game state lives in the world
The intrusion
Two-state lighting in practice
Your warm space, their cold pressure through the door — the palette rule staged where it matters most.
Warm = yours · cold = outside · red = damage
The stethoscope
The peek that powers the strategy
Hear the next chamber, then choose: pass, or point it at yourself for the extra turn.
The loading ceremony
Game state as information design
Rounds laid out in the open. The odds are public — tension is knowing exactly how bad it is.
The marking
Identity that survives inside the scene
The IP's glyph sprayed in-world, not overlaid. If it can't exist inside the room, it doesn't exist.
Product keyframes directed in Claude Design from the locked visual system · the corresponding scenes are built in Unity
06 · Directing the production
One designer, one AI production team: I own the design and how it feels in VR; the AI proves its work before it lands.
May ’26
S1 · first brief
Jul 12
Design frozen · gate passed
Jul ’26
90 fps measured on Quest 3
Now
Art phase · full cast in scene
Next
Horizon Store + Steam
- Engine
- Unity 6 · URP · XR Interaction Toolkit · OpenXR
- Target
- Meta Quest 3 standalone · Horizon Store + Steam
- Development
- Claude Code · gated by the automated test suite
- Characters
- Generative AI for geometry & textures · rigs scripted in Blender
- Audio
- Original score composed in-house · rights clean
- Method
- 77 logged sessions · every decision dated
The rig that exploded
AI rigs threw meshes 80–280 m off their marks. Now the AI authors geometry only; every skeleton is rebuilt by script in Blender — hands from 30 cm off to 0.9 cm.
A minor · 3/4 · 72 bpm · bar 8 lands on the dominant — no cadence, no exit
A song that never resolves
Ella's line — “if I sing it, it never ends” — made literal: her waltz, composed in-house, never cadences. The loop has no exit.
Playtesting without a headset
Synthetic pre-triage photographs every art change in batch; what can't be judged flat goes to blind testers who meet the game cold.
07 · How it's validated
“In development” doesn't mean “on faith” — and what's still open is listed, not hidden.
537 EditMode + 16 PlayMode tests green before any merge.
2,000 headless matches per balance pass.
Three blind testers — no lore briefing, tension measured cold.
90 fps measured on Quest 3, standalone.
Human voice acting — three voices, cast not chosen.
Lighting bake + performance pass with the full cast.
The full memory-loop campaign, end-to-end in-headset.
08 · What this proves
An original IP taken from a one-line premise to a playable build on hardware — every product and art decision mine.
brand thinking, product judgment and art direction, proven on the hardest brief: one I set myself.
77
dev sessions logged
537
automated tests, green
90
fps on Quest 3 hardware
2,000
simulated matches per balance pass
The practice behind my AI Fluency certification (Anthropic): AI compresses exploration and execution; judgment directs it