Surface Breach

Safehouse location
Gameplay
Selecting a perk during level-up
Using one of the hand abilities to kill enemies
Flying enemies emerge!
Ew, spiders!
Safehouse location overview
Some objects can be picked up with your hands. Explosive!

Inspiration

We've always loved the "just one more run" feeling of bullet-hell survivors like Spell Brigade, but we wanted to experience that chaos in VR. The problem? Most VR games make you be the hero. We wanted to watch over the hero, like a god protecting their champion. What if you could control both at once?

What it does

Surface Breach is a VR bullet-hell survivor where you simultaneously play as a massive god entity AND the tiny Champion fighting below. Your Champion auto-attacks hordes of fantasy monsters while you guide their movement from above. But when things get overwhelming, YOU step in: reaching down with giant hands to grab weapons, crush enemies, and unleash devastating god powers.

The twist: you're not just observing. You're actively participating at two scales. Guide your Champion through zombies, imps, and liches. Level up. Choose perks. And when the swarm closes in, become the weapon yourself.

How we built it

Built in Unreal Engine 5 with a heavy focus on performance optimization for standalone VR:

Mass Entity System: Renders 300+ animated enemies simultaneously using GPU-instanced Niagara particles with Vertex Animation Textures (VAT). No skeletal meshes per enemy. The battlefield is a living chaos engine with entities constantly spawning, attacking, dying, and respawning in different variations.
Custom Spatial Octree: O(log N) queries for collision detection, targeting, and area effects
Gameplay Ability System (GAS): Powers the perk system, auto-attacks, and god abilities
Data-Driven Design: All enemies, perks, and spawn waves configured through Data Assets for rapid iteration

Challenges we ran into

Scale perception in VR: Players expect to feel present, but we needed them to feel massive. Getting the god-perspective right (where your hands feel huge and the Champion feels tiny but still responsive) took countless iterations.
Performance on Quest: Spawning 300+ animated enemies on standalone hardware seemed impossible. We built a custom rendering pipeline using Mass entities and Niagara with extended VAT support (animation blending, one-shot states, dynamic play rates). Every processor had to be optimized: parallel execution, game-thread safety, deferred spawning.
Dual-scale input: Balancing controls that feel natural for both guiding a tiny Champion AND using massive god hands required constant tuning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

300+ enemies on Quest 3: Hundreds of animated enemies on standalone VR hardware, all spawning, attacking, dying, and being replaced in real-time
Dual-scale VR gameplay: Successfully making players feel like both a tiny hero AND a massive god simultaneously
Sub-frame collision detection: Custom spatial octree handles thousands of projectile-enemy interactions without frame drops
Data-driven everything: Designers can create new enemies, perks, and spawn waves without touching code
The "wow moments": Dramatic spawn events where 30+ enemies burst onto screen in formations never gets old

What we learned

Mass Entity architecture is incredibly powerful but requires thinking differently about game logic
VR scale perception is fragile: small tweaks to hand size or camera height completely change how "godlike" you feel
The "cozy lair vs. chaotic surface" contrast isn't just aesthetic. It gives players emotional breathing room.