Last Light: Bigfoot

What I Built

Last Light: Bigfoot is a survival and resource-management game set in a dark forest. The player must leave the safety of camp to gather resources, chop wood, break rocks, find evidence, and prepare supplies while keeping their lantern burning through the night.

The farther the player travels from the light, the greater the risk. Making noise while gathering resources can attract Bigfoot. Players can use a slingshot and collected stones to defend themselves long enough to escape, but Bigfoot cannot simply be defeated - the goal is to survive him, not beat him.

I also added an investigation system that rewards exploration: pieces of Bigfoot evidence scattered through the forest, gradually building into a collection across repeat runs.

Each system was designed to feed back into the same core survival loop:

Explore → Gather → Return to Camp → Refuel → Survive.

How I Built It

I built the game as a mobile-focused HTML5 experience using JavaScript, Three.js, HTML, and CSS, designed specifically around portrait mobile play rather than treated as a smaller desktop game. Movement, gathering, the slingshot, the HUD, inventory, interactions, and menus all had to stay understandable and usable on a small touch screen. The interface uses responsive HTML and CSS, while the game world, characters, effects, and interactions run through the game itself. I designed the artwork and visual direction around a stylized Pacific Northwest wilderness - warm lantern and campfire light against deep blue-green nighttime forest.

Almost none of it was designed on paper and left alone. Nearly every system in the final build was shaped by watching someone actually play it and noticing what didn't land the way I expected, then going back in and fixing exactly that.

What I Learned

One of the biggest things I learned was how different designing for mobile is from designing an immersive VR experience. In VR, I can use physical space, scale, movement, and the player's surroundings to communicate information. On a phone, every pixel matters - I had to think much more carefully about visual hierarchy, touch controls, readable UI, feedback, and how quickly a player can understand what's happening at a glance.

I also learned how important it is for individual mechanics to support one another rather than just existing side by side. Chopping wood isn't just resource gathering - it creates noise. Noise can attract Bigfoot. Bigfoot approaching creates pressure to leave. Leaving early means bringing less wood back to camp. Less wood means less light, and less light means greater danger. That interaction became far more interesting than simply adding more features ever would have.

And underneath all of it was a quieter lesson: something that looks finished on my own screen can still fall apart the moment a real stranger touches it under conditions I never personally tested. The only way to actually know a thing works is to watch it fail in someone else's hands first, then fix that - not the version of the problem that was easy to imagine.

Inspiration

Last Light: Bigfoot grew out of ideas I had already been exploring through my VR worlds. I have always loved building environments that make players feel like they are actually somewhere else - dark forests, campgrounds, wilderness settings, places where you never quite know what might be hiding beyond what you can see.

Prior publications gave me the chance to explore the fun and mystery of searching for Bigfoot, shaped the atmosphere, exploration, and sense of being alone in the wilderness. For this project, I wanted to take pieces of what I loved about those experiences and see how they could translate into a completely different format: a portrait mobile survival game.

Instead of simply hunting Bigfoot, I flipped the idea around. This time, Bigfoot is hunting you.

The central idea became very simple: keep the light on.

Challenges

One of my biggest challenges was balancing information with suspense. The player needs enough feedback to understand the game, but showing too much makes Bigfoot less frightening. I wanted players to feel danger increasing without turning the experience into a radar game where they always know exactly where he is.

Another challenge was scope. I had a lot of ideas for things I could add, but I kept coming back to the same question: does this make the survival loop better? That question is what kept the project centered on the lantern, the gathering, the risk, the encounters, and surviving the night, rather than letting the prototype sprawl into something unnecessarily complicated.

The last stretch brought a different kind of challenge entirely - making sure the finished build actually ran the same way for someone else as it did for me, on their own device, under their own conditions, with nothing assumed and nothing taken for granted. It was humbling, and it was some of the most valuable debugging I did on the whole project.

Bringing ideas from previous experiences has been especially fun because it let me revisit a type of world I already love creating, but from an entirely new perspective. What started as an immersive VR idea became a compact mobile survival game where one little circle of light is all that stands between the player and whatever is waiting in the woods.