Case 05 · Product design & art direction · original VR IP

Wrong Room
an interface read under pressure — now running on the headset.

Tools · Unity · Claude Code · BlenderStatus · In development · playable build

112

dev sessions logged

790

automated tests, green

fps on Quest 3 hardware

20,000

simulated matches per balance finalist

The short version

An original VR game for Quest 3 — design, art direction and code all mine.
You wake in a motel room with two debt collectors and a half-loaded revolver, and the room itself is the interface: no tutorial, no HUD.
The hard problem was comfort. A motorised wheelchair became the only locomotion, which fixed the ergonomics and wrote backstory at once.
It runs on hardware at 90 fps, under 790 automated tests, with 112 dated sessions behind it.

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?”

Premise: Wake amnesiac in a motel room. Two collectors. One revolver.
Loop: Explore the room → duel at the table → a memory unlocks.
Ending: Ten memories. The tenth turns the TVs on.

Tension must stay usable

Fear is the product; confusion is a bug.

The room is the interface

Game state lives in the world — never in an overlay.

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.

Concept sheet of the motorised wheelchair — Decision 01 · Not in the original design
Locomotion became character
Standing to explore and seated to duel broke reach and comfort at every switch. A motorised wheelchair became the only locomotion — comfort, controls and backstory in one object.
Problem
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.
Move
A motorised wheelchair becomes the game’s only locomotion: always seated, everything in reach, movement itself part of the fiction.
Payoff
One object fixed comfort, unified both phases of the game and wrote backstory — the chair is lore, set dressing and controls at once.

Seated first-person view, feet strapped to the chair — 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

The bullet language: live, blank, and the red round — Decision 03
The core move nobody understood
Self-aim on a blank earns the extra turn — taught by watching Él do it first. The third cold tester finally explained the rule back.
Five fixes across code, feedback and staging

Diegetic world-space UI showing the score — 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

Grotesque-domestic art direction, inspired by Dorohedoro.

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

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

Silhouette, palette role and staging carry the personality — same job as a brand voice: say who you are before you say a word.

The motel room before the assault: warm, lived-in light — State 1 · before — warm, lived-in, yours

The same room after the assault: one hard light over the table — State 2 · after — the warmth dies, one hard light

Light does the storytelling — and the interface has to 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 stethoscope

The peek that powers the strategy

Hear the next chamber, then choose: pass, or point it at yourself for the extra turn.

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

Now

Art phase · full cast and player body in scene

Horizon Store + Steam

Ella pose sheet — the locked gothic direction — 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.

Black-and-white values test of the room — Playtesting without a headset
Synthetic pre-triage photographs every art change in batch, so what reaches the headset is only what can't be judged flat.

07 · Problems met on the way

The project's worst enemy has a name: the failure that produces no error.

The simulator lied

When the model is wrong, retire the metric, re-argue the decision

The motion sickness that wasn’t the game

Read the platform’s log before touching yours

The fix that would have overruled my own eye

Correct the math underneath, respect what the eye approved

The simulator lied

Decision 03 above — Él opening the round to teach the move — was adopted on a simulated −5.6 pts of player win rate. Ten days later a fixed model measured +16.9: the sim never gave the opponent a memory, so it undervalued the player’s best synergy. The number was retired; the decision stayed, re-argued on what it actually does — teach.

The motion sickness that wasn’t the game

“Each eye feels off” read like a stereo bug. The headset’s own log said it plainly: 471× ‘images too dark’ — the real-world room was too dark for inside-out tracking. The fix was a lamp in the physical room. Zero code changed.

The fix that would have overruled my own eye

Item scale silently depended on which tray an object spawned in — a cigarette declaring 100 mm measured 108. But two of those sizes I had tuned in-headset with the bug already there: what I approved was the look, not the number. The fix recomputes those targets so nothing I signed off by eye moves.

08 · How it's validated

“In development” doesn't mean “on faith” — and what's still open is listed, not hidden.

400 full campaigns simulated to measure progression pacing — the napkin math said 10 matches; the real number is ~23.

Three blind testers — no lore briefing, tension measured cold.

Re-measure fps after the added shadow work — the budget is a contract, not a memory.

Human voice acting — three voices, cast not chosen.

The full memory-loop campaign, end-to-end in-headset.

09 · 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.

112

dev sessions logged

790

automated tests, green

fps on Quest 3 hardware

20,000

simulated matches per balance finalist

The practice behind my AI Fluency certification (Anthropic): AI compresses exploration and execution; judgment directs it

All work Start a project

Tension must stay usable

The room is the interface

Locomotion became character

An honest comfort rating

The core move nobody understood

The story rewrote the economy

“Amber = active danger”

Aesthetic vignette

Film grain in post

Chromatic aberration

The table is the interface

The peek that powers the strategy

Identity that survives inside the scene

The rig that exploded

A song that never resolves

Playtesting without a headset

The simulator lied

The motion sickness that wasn’t the game

The fix that would have overruled my own eye