Peppy's Pizza: A VR Horror Game

Peppy's Pizza began as a Halloween game jam with a group of my coworkers in Digital with the bulk of the game being completed over a long weekend. Check out the trailer below!

Early on our team came up with the idea of having the game set in a large apartment-style building with an old, vintage, gated elevator connecting the player to various levels. This created a framework with scaffolding that allowed individuals to design their own rooms so long as they stuck to a handful of requirements: rooms had to be prefabbed and named according to a convention that allowed the elevator in the main scene to find and connect them to the panel. Additionally each individual room had to be the size of the play area with the elevator entrance or “dock” in the same place and orientation.

A main scene (containing the elevator and an empty elevator shaft) would fetch, turn on, and turn off floors as needed to create the feeling on one seamless building. Meanwhile, on the narrative side, we created a loose framework to tie the experience together using VO from Mr. Murderson to talk to the player throughout the experience, providing unique contextual VO commenting on what was happening within rooms, and then offering more generic guidance on the player’s overall mission during the interstitial elevator rides.

The floor I designed and built was the so-called “’Safe’ Room”. In the context of the game, it’s the first floor the player visits after receiving their mission and leaving the lobby: The player enters a pleasant, brightly-lit parlor adorned with attractive furniture and art as classical music plays. The main feature of the room is a large iron safe that rests, conspicuously, on a raised marble block in the center of the room. Safe-cracking tools litter the room around the platform. When the user attempts to crack the safe, blades emerge from the ceiling and a mechanism causes the entire ceiling to steadily lower.

As the ceiling lowers, lights sconces pop off the wall and shatter changing the tone and temperature of the room. Eventually only a small pool of light reamains. The player will naturally hunker down away from the knives to stay in the lit area, moving closer to the safe.

After an excruciating few moments, the knives are stopped by coming into contact with the safe and the door pops open to reveal a fuse (as well as a human skull wearing a Peppy’s Pizza delivery boy hat). At this point, nearly every major light source has been destroyed. The fuse asset has a bright blue light associated with it making the fuse the most obvious point of interest in the environment. When the player picks up the fuse, the ceiling will raise, allowing the player to return to the elevator.

My Safe Room ended up being the first that players visited in the building so in addition to making a classic trap room with a series of understandable beats, there were a handful of things I wanted to accomplish to serve the overall game:

I also did a credits sequence where you descend back down to the lobby and developer names are displayed over the rooms they contributed to. It’s a nice callback to some of the game’s set pieces (also, more VR games need cool, environmentally-based credits sequences!)