Making Sentenced VR - Postmortem, Experience

It’s been a couple of months now since Sentenced launched, and now seems a good time to look back on the launch development, and the experience of making my first game in general.

Our time is generally divided between doing the things we love, and doing the things we need. Back in 2016 I’d been working in the Visual Effects industry for several years. I’d built up plenty of technical and artistic knowledge during that time, and while I was enjoying my work and the people I worked with, it was beginning to lose its lustre, and transition from being something I loved, to simply my job.

The value of steady employment, decent pay and satisfying work is not to be understated. However, increasingly I felt that I wanted to express myself through my work more. An egotistical desire, but one many in creative industries feel after years of working on commercial projects for big corporations.

Big-budget Hollywood films can be very entertaining, but are primarily designed to make a large profit, through either selling the film itself, or through the sale of associated merchandising. Hollywood films (especially those with lots of big CGI action sequences) tend towards capitalizing on nostalgia and existing trends, rather than an individual’s desire to express something creatively.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with making entertainment for the sake of it. It’s more that I don't believe it’s my purpose. The wheel will continue to turn whether I am a spoke in it or not.

In addition, the industry itself can be very pressurized, and loyalty is rarely rewarded. There are issues with long hours, unpaid overtime and pay disparities. Often, when deadlines were approaching, people would get stressed, anxious and tensions would run high. I always found this faintly absurd; after all, we’re only making movies, it’s hardly a matter of life or death. I’m not suggesting people don’t do their best, but why so serious?

And so I set about trying to decide how to fulfil that desire to ‘do what I loved’. I’ve always been in love with video games, ever since my parents bought me a SEGA Megadrive and a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog when I was six. Initially I’d wanted to go into the games industry rather than the film industry, however, graduating towards the end of the 2008/2009 financial crisis meant that breaking into any industry was tough. When the opportunity to become a Runner (general errand boy) at one of the biggest VFX houses in London presented itself, I took it. My father also worked in the film industry as a production carpenter, which had been a huge inspiration to me, and I found it somewhat poetic that I should be carrying on the family trade, but on a computer rather than practically.

Game development technology moved rapidly. By 2017, powerful and user friendly game engines which offered free licences to indie developers, such as Unity and Unreal, were becoming increasingly accessible. I downloaded the latest version of Unity and began to experiment. My first game, made in one evening, allowed you to toggle between a picture of broccoli and a picture of meat, to which a cube with Morrissey’s face on it would react. Unfortunately, this masterpiece only lives on in the form of grainy phone to screen images.

Around the same time, the first wave of modern Virtual Reality headsets appeared on the market, lead by two high-end competitors, the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. At the time I was working for a company called Industrial Light and Magic, who were developing a short experimental Star Wars game for VR called ‘Trials on Tatooine’. I had the opportunity to try it, and was infatuated immediately. It was so immersive! VR blew me away in a manner that was reminiscent of the first time I saw a 3D game being played, on my cousin’s Playstation.

My mind was racing with the possibilities. I was struck by the sense of presence and scale that a player has in VR. Life-sized characters with whom you could make eye contact felt like a big step. I was witnessing the birth of a new medium for art and entertainment.

In 2016 Trump was elected as President in America, and in the UK the people had voted to leave the European Union. During both campaigns, voters had been bombarded with fake news and misinformation. It seemed that right-wing neoliberal fascism was on the rise, and some of the language reminded me of the Nazi propaganda that I had studied at school, particularly in the rhetoric surrounding the Syrian refugee crisis happening around the same time.

As the descendant of a German Jewish World War 2 refugee, the psychology dictating the behavior of dominant social groups towards minorities has always fascinated me. I owe my life to the kindness of the British people who let my Grandfather settle in the UK. For a lot of Jews, myself included, there’s also a fascination with the holocaust as the ultimate expression of xenophobia that comes at the extreme end of intolerance.

In 1969 Stanley Milgram performed a series of experiments on Obedience to Authority, which became extremely famous due to their shocking results (pun intended) and controversial nature. Milgram, like myself, was interested in how, given the right social and environmental circumstances, humans could be capable of committing such atrocities as those seen in the second world war. Were the Nazi’s simply all evil, or was that capability within anyone?

These two trains of thought converged, and I decided that I wanted to use Virtual Reality to make a game that was an experimental homage to Milgram’s experiment. After casting around for a suitable setting for a dilemma of obedience, I settled on the early-modern executioner.

In Milgram’s experiment volunteers pressed a button to deliver an electric shock, but I felt this would be too abstract for a VR game. Even with the increased sense of immersion, the player is still aware that none of what is happening is ‘real’. I wanted to give the act of harming another human more weight, and public execution by beheading was perfect as it involves the physical act of swinging a sword. This would require skill as well as the will to perform the act. In addition, the element of performance, combined with a bloodthirsty crowd exerting pressure, the drama and narrative of public execution seemed perfect. My final vision for the game was ultimately something that would play like an interactive theatre in which the player was put into increasingly uncomfortable situations, in order to see how they would react when their personal conscience conflicted with authority.

The first hurdle was financial. I knew at this point what I wanted to do, but not how to do it practically. I was working a full time job and paying a London rent. I wasn’t sure how to acquire outside funding for the game. I put together a pitch and applied to a few funding schemes for indie game developers, but with no success.

The second hurdle was technical. I was aware that it was theoretically possible for me to make a game solo using new technology and tools, but I had no real experience. I was confident that I could manage the artistic side of the project, after all, I’d been working as a 3D modeller for years and had some experience in texturing too. But I would need to come up with solutions for animation, programming, music and voice acting, all of which were unknown to me at the start of the project.

Hiring help wasn’t really an option financially, and finding a partner to take the risk on such a project felt like a long shot. I was sure, even from the outset, that Sentenced wouldn’t be a great financial success. I was making an experimental game for a niche market. At that point in time, there had been no smash hit VR games at all. Big developers were keeping clear, leaving it to the indies to throw shit at the wall in order to see what stuck.

My hope was that Sentenced would become enough of a success based on it’s unique premise that I could consider leveraging its popularity to crowdfund my next game.

I needed a prototype, a proof-of-concept. And to make that, I needed time. Working a full time job left me quite exhausted, and though I’d been doing a little work in my spare time, I knew I wouldn’t be able to put in the hours required to make an entire game alone in any reasonable time frame. Little did I know, but at this point in time I was beginning to feel the early symptoms of fatigue that would herald my diagnosis with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, a fairly rare genetic heart condition that I’ll go into later. Needless to say, even then I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to work a full time job AND pursue my passion project.

When my contract was up at Industrial Light & Magic I decided to take a risk and not renew it. I figured I’d need about 3 months to make a prototype, so it was just a case of figuring out how I could stretch my savings to give myself that time. Staying in London wasn’t an option; my rent was too expensive. So, I packed my hulking desktop PC into a suitcase and flew to Budapest, where I lived for three months and created the prototype for Sentenced.

Almost to my surprise, it was a success.

Initial experimentation in Unity

Prototyping systems for beheading

Exploring simple facial animation

The end result after spending three months prototyping in Budapest

Though many of the systems I built for the prototype would eventually be replaced, the most important part of the experiment had been proving that it was possible to make a game on my own. Even so, I was extremely naive regarding what an epic undertaking it would turn out to be. I decided to go ahead with the plan, and Sentenced would be my obsession for the next four years.

The first thing I needed was to save up enough money to buy myself some time. I estimated that I’d need 6-12 months of full time work. It ended up taking over 18 months.

I packed my PC into my suitcase once more, and this time flew much further to Wellington, New Zealand, where I would work for Weta Digital, a VFX company known for their work on my favourite film trilogy of all time, ‘The Lord of the Rings’. They were also known for paying well and working long hours. Perfect for saving up to make a video game.

I stayed at Weta for a year. I worked harder than I’d ever worked in my life, too hard in fact. Weta paid by the hour, and overtime was largely self directed. Because I was trying to save up as much as possible in a short space of time, I put a lot of pressure on myself to work as hard as I could. I burned out, big time. I loved the time I spent overall in New Zealand. It’s one of the most beautiful and friendly countries I’ve ever visited, but I came to resent how much of my time I was spending working in that windowless office.

By the time my year was up I’d saved enough (or so I thought) to make Sentenced. I left the friends I’d made in New Zealand with a heavy heart, excited to have a stretch of time ahead of me with no bosses, where I’d be able to do nothing but work on my dream project. In Budapest I’d had a taste of working for myself, and I wanted more.

I moved from New Zealand to Berlin. Why Berlin, I hear you ask? Well, it felt like an appropriate place for several reasons. Firstly, my biggest historical inspiration was a book called ‘The Faithful Executioner’ by Joel F. Harrington. The book studies the life and times of one Frantz Schmidt, executioner for the city of Nuremberg in the late 16th-17th Century. As a result it felt appropriate to be to Germany, while making the game, and I also thought I’d be able to sneak in a trip to Nuremberg too, to see the famous ‘Henker Haus’ itself, Frantz Schmidt’s once-abode.

In addition, my family is from Berlin, on the Jewish side, and following Brexit I had applied for German citizenship, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to see what remained of the family history and to immerse myself in German culture.

In addition, as with Budapest, the cost of living is lower than in London. Over the course of the next year I made great progress, getting the majority of the assets and systems in place. One particular highlight was an event called ‘Talk & Play’ which happened once every two months, run by BerlinGameScene.com. At one of these events I previewed Sentenced for the first time to crowds, who were able to play through an early version of the execution of Anna Arnoldin. It proved popular! People were queued to play, and the responses I got were interesting and fascinating. The feeling of making something from scratch that people were enjoying was exhilarating. It remains one of my fondest memories, and I regret that I was never able to show the game off at further events due to the Covid-19 pandemic which was still in full swing in the year preceding and during launch.

Trailer 1, which was released on July 2nd 2019, at the end of my time in Berlin

I had been hopeful that I’d be able to complete the game before I ran out of money, but alas, development took longer than I’d been expecting. In addition, my heart condition was worsening, leaving me with less and less energy.

Eventually, I was diagnosed with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, a genetic heart disease. This, in addition to my financial situation, led me to decide that the best course of action was to move back to London, get a job in VFX and save up once more while taking advantage of access to the wonderful NHS in order to get care for my heart.

I worked for just under a year on a modern Tom & Jerry movie, a film as different tonally from my game as was possible. Although both are fairly violent, I suppose.

By November 2020 the film was complete, and I had saved up enough money for the final push on Sentenced. I’d initially intended to finish the game in 3 months - however, a spanner was thrown into the works when it became apparent that I would need open heart surgery. This, along with my worsening symptoms, got in the way of development. At the time the UK was in the midst of the pandemic and we were all under lockdown, and these things combined made this one of the most difficult periods of my life.

The game was eventually completed by June of 2021. I was exhausted but triumphant; finally, two years later than I’d hoped, I was finished. The release itself was understated. The UK still had restrictions on meetings of more than 6 people due to Covid, and as a result I was unable to attend any events to help promote the game; everything had to be done online. I made as much of a noise as I could, and when the day came, June 25th, all I could do was hope and pray to the fickle gods of the internet.

The ‘Sentenced’ launch trailer, released June 25th 2021

The reception was good! I wouldn’t say that it ‘blew up’, but I was pleased to see it wasn’t being ignored either. Several news outlets reported the release of the game, along with a couple who also took the time to review it.

During the launch I was a total bag of nerves. Every negative review was a shot to the heart, and every positive review made me feel as though I’d conquered the world. I was constantly refreshing the community page on Steam, praying that no bugs would appear, and when they did, praying that they would be easy to fix.

Over the next few weeks, streamers would pick up the game and reviews would continue to come in, and eventually the scores settled at around 75-80% positive, more than I’d dared hope for with my first game, especially considering it was a solo effort.

Reactions were roughly what I’d expected, with a few interesting divergences. Firstly, it seemed that way more people were rebelling during the game than I’d expected. However, the curve of rebellions falling off as users invested more time in the game was in line with what I’d predicted.

It’s difficult to know which rebellions were due to the player feeling a psychological connection with their actions in the game and the characters, and which were simply players messing around and being silly in VR. At some point I might do a questionnaire. If one were to search for ‘Sentenced’ playthroughs on Youtube, most of the examples of play are showing the latter - people messing around in VR. However, this generally seems to be the way of things for youtube streamers - usually, they aim to entertain by being silly and trying to break the games they are playing, for comedic effect.

The comments and reviews are a slightly better indication. There’s a mix. Some players found the game to be an interesting and thought provoking experiment, while others simply found it to be a boring game with ‘too much talking and not enough action’.

The majority of games in the VR market currently are either rhythm-action games or shooting galleries, and Sentenced certainly bucks the trend by trying to offer a more narrative focused experience. Only time will tell how the VR market might evolve, and whether it will mature and diversify. Personally, I am very proud of my own contribution to a new media which is still finding its way.

It’s worth mentioning here that so far, Sentenced has not made back it’s initial investment. Trying to calculate the cost of making the game is a bit of wooly. If I had been paying myself a day rate to work on the game, the figure would be huge. I am instead choosing to count the cost of making the game as equal to the amount (roughly) that I spent on food and rent during my time making the game, which I estimate was around £24,000. As of writing, nearly three months after launch, Sentenced has sold around 1500 copies and made around £5,500 (net). It’s conceivable that in it’s lifetime it might approach me making back what I spent on it, but only time will tell. It might be worth doing a retrospective on this after a year or so.

So, what was it like to make a game, on my own, with no external funding? Simply put, it was bliss. Sentenced was very much an art project. Unlike everything else I’ve done since graduating, it was a project primarily driven by my desire to create and my desire to express myself, rather than as an attempt to make a marketable product. I did make a marketable product for sure, but at no point did I ever tailor the project to sell - I just made a game that I would like to play.

I picked up a huge amount of skills along the way, and had the time of my life putting the project together. Working on the music, working alongside voice actors, writing scripts and then motion capture acting them out were all absolute joys. There were many challenges for certain, but most I managed to overcome or work around. I thoroughly enjoy problem solving, and there was plenty of that.

The big question is, what comes next? Without a doubt, I would like to make another game. In fact, I already have several ideas. The bigger problem is, of course, money. It’s a fact that Sentenced took me longer to make than I would have liked. Experience would undoubtedly lead me to make my next project much faster, however, it’s quite obviously not sustainable to make games that make me a loss forever.

Given unlimited resources, I would probably just make weird games on my own or in collaboration with others ad-infinitum, but this is Capitalism, and you’ve got to make a living. For now, I’m taking a well deserved break, and considering my next move.

Rest assured, this isn’t the last you’ve heard of me.
Until next time.
Keep it weird,
Samuel