Upbringing

Upbringing is a VR game built in Unity with the XR Interaction Toolkit, targeting the HTC Vive and coded in C#. It takes place in a haunted toy house standing in for a twisted childhood. The player avoids Mother, the antagonist, and solves puzzles to escape.

It started as a school assignment. I kept going well past what the assignment needed because I liked what the game was becoming.

Every 2D asset (walls, floors, mannequins, props) I made myself in Photoshop and GIMP. The mannequin poses were sketched roughly first, and the symbols on them were freestyled with reference to Minecraft's enchantment table glyphs. The 3D assets came from the Unity Asset Store and were modified to match the art direction.

Lighting came first, before any layout work. I wanted an intentionally dark atmosphere rather than a dark scene that just looked underlit, and getting there took a lot of trial and error.

Coding took the longest by far: the chase AI for the mannequins, the randomisation of their poses and symbols, and the final Simon Says puzzle. That last one was the most fiddly, since the generated sequence had to persist and be checked against player input correctly rather than approximately.