The Last Shark
OVERVIEW
As part of my acceptance into the Oculus Launchpad 2020 program, I wanted to create a game that tackled the pressing environmental issue regarding the global shortage of sharks in our oceans. Ove the course of 5 months, I got to work on a VR experience that would be accessible to the core gaming audience while speaking to these larger environmental issues. The result is a stealth-action VR game called The Last Shark.
ROLE
I was the sole developer and designer on the project and used Unity and C# to power my technical and artistic approach. By consulting with scientists and researchers in the field my initial game structure evolved from creating survival-based gameplay to one that is more direct in creating a bond between the player and the ocean. The end result is an experience where the player is actively saving the last sharks on Earth and is encountering threats such as shark finners and mafia rings — both of which reflect threats in the real-world.
CHALLENGES & PROCESS
From the start of the project, it was difficult to understand what the final experience was going to look like, both thematically and visually. For the longest time, the experience was more of a hardcore stealth game where players sneaked into an illegal shark-finning operation and saved the last shark on Earth. However, while play-testing and receiving preliminary feedback, audiences didn’t care about this single shark. There was no connection between the player and the shark. The solution was to create a beginning sequence that visually showed how sharks interact as a family. This allowed the player to emotionally invest in these shark characters. Additionally, the depictions of violence towards these sharks as they are captured helped prime the player to save or help these creatures.
Another challenge was understanding where to focus the game mechanics. After much trial-and-error involving prototyping survival gameplay (i.e, crafting, eating, paying attention to hunger and oxygen meters), I decided to focus on locomotion as the central mechanic. This target branched into many different forms of locomotion, including swimming, running, walking, crouching, and climbing — all of which supported the stealth game-loop present during the majority of the experience.
PUBLISHING & THE FUTURE
The Last Shark was submitted to the Launchpad program in February 2021, and although it was not selected to receive funding I view this project as a resounding success. This experience is available to try now via App Lab.