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French
During Laval Virtual 2023, we met the team behind Hide The Corpse, a VR game created by students from French digital arts school Isart Digital.
Here’s the pitch:
You wake up in a hotel room you’ve never seen in your life and right in front of you is a dead body… Quick! The police are on their way! Convince them you’re innocent? No way they’ll believe you. Only one solution: hide the corpse!
Here is the trailer, followed by more information about the project.
Game Art : Manon CHAUMETTE, Silja HURY, Sandrine PANAROTTO
Game Design : Quentin CROIZIT, Pierre-Oscar CHANTEBEL, Julia ZAKRZEWSKA
Game Design & Programming : Auxana GOLLNICK, Hugo TEYSSIER
Game Programming : Damien AVICE, Benjamin HAMELIN
Music & Sound Design : Titien LEONI
Developped for Meta Quest 2 using Unity, Hide the Corpse is available for free. The idea behind the game might seem a bit gruesome, but there is no blood or gore. Hide the Corpse is first and foremost a ragdoll simulator. You will have to move the body and hide it, and the dead body reacts in a realistic manner, unlike most ragdolls in videogames. The team behind the game worked hard on this part of the project.
Their goal was also to let the player feel how heavy a dead body can be, and that moving it is far from easy. They managed this with two tricks : haptic feedback thanks to the Quest 2 controllers, as well as visual feedback on each hand, showing the force/weight carried. Should you pull the body too fast, or should you try to lift it using a single hand, and you will end up letting go of it. We had to carefully balance the force between our two hands and pull the body slowly across the room to avoid this.
Hide the Corpse features various places where the body can be hidden (such as a bathtub and a wardrobe), and the room will change when you replay the game: in other words, it has a good replay value.
From student project to commercial game
Hide the Corpse caught the eye of Realcast, a studio developping VR/AR/MR games and experiences. Some members of the team joined the company, and a fully-fledged commercial game is on the way!
In a nutshell, 6 members of the team behind the student project joined Realcast, while 6 others decided to work elsewhere. Of course, since the twelve former students were co-creators of the game, they all received a sum of money when Realcast acquired the rights.
We will have the opportunity to talk about this upcoming game when it is released. In the meantime, you can still play Hide the Corpse for free on Meta Quest 2.
