Off With their Heads

The game is a virtual reality game. You take the role of a powerful and ruthless monarch, and the game is about how your court rises to meet your every whim, combined with the absurdity of formality in a deadly situation.

The interface is based around only using the vr device itself. As the monarch, you are stationary on your throne, surveying your court. This is analogue to your sense of sitting in your chair to play the game. You communicate with individuals through nodding or shaking your head at them to indicate the action they should take. Additionally, through the mere importance of your status just fastening your gaze on an individual can have the effect of making them nervous or complacent.

A core mechanic of the game is the presence of the royal executioner in the throne room. By giving him a nod after you have looked at a presenting noble or some other member of court, the executioner will promptly take action and execute the individual, mid speech if needed.

The game aims to show no blood or gore. The executioners broad shoulder would hide any victim, only having the axe going up and an abrupt end to a speech or a short and surprised response from the relevant individual as the cue to what has happened. The Executioner then returns to his stand, dragging a black bag. The absurdity is reinforced by the fact that others in court takes little note of the entire process.

Pipeline and Production Values

The game is set to take place in a single scene. Most of the cost of production will thus be tied to recording voice and doing animation. We have the advantage though that unlike most games, there is almost no interaction between characters in unpredictable manners. So unlike most games, all the animation takes the form of a single performance, with a very small set of possible branchings. We believe that this is a really good fit for motion capture. We use a cartoony artstyle with simplified characters, but proportionally to the core point in a mocap rig, the models fit really well. With the broader strokes in the physiology of these characters, we also believe that we can more smoothly gloss over any possible problems with the quality of mocap data, allowing for far less cleanup than the process would normally require.