THE DOTS
The Dots is a VR horror game where players ride a lift into shifting, eerie environments while being hunted by The Maw - a bloodthirsty demon that senses sound and fear. Players must keep singing or speaking to create protective ripples, while a custom heart-rate sensor feeds real-time data into the game, making the ghost more aggressive as fear rises. The result is a tense, multisensory experience blending psychological horror, sound-based gameplay, and biometric feedback.
Tools used
Unreal Engine
Blender
Timeline
3 weeks
Type
VR Horror Game
Role
Game Designer, 3D Artist, Hardware Integrator
Contributors
Gourav
Concept
We drew inspiration from iconic horror games and films such as Phasmophobia, Little Nightmares, A Quiet Place, and IT to craft a story centered on fear, memory, and survival.
Players awaken in a haunting, unfamiliar environment with no memory of who they are or how they arrived.
A single lift - the only seemingly safe space- becomes their sole refuge.
To uncover their lost past, they must collect scattered artifacts that piece together fragments of memory.
Will they piece together the truth before The Maw devours them?
Once the core concept was solidified, we focused on the player–monster dynamic, ensuring every encounter fueled tension:
Sound-Based Survival: Players must speak or sing to generate protective ripples. Silence invites danger.
Heart-Rate Integration: Using a custom ESP32 sensor, the monster’s aggression scales with the player’s fear, sensed through rising heartbeats.
Artifact Collection: Players explore multiple environments to recover memory fragments, balancing exploration with stealth.
The Lift as Safe Haven: Returning to the lift offers temporary safety and acts as a checkpoint, heightening risk/reward decisions.
World Bulding
After finalizing mechanics, we developed immersive environments and assets:
The Forest – An endless, blood-tinged woodland with dense trees and a crimson lake, symbolizing raw evil.
The Asylum – Abandoned corridors of shattered walls and rotting stairways, littered with test subjects’ remains, reflecting a broken mental state.
The Maw – A grotesque figure of exposed muscle and torn skin.
Long, clawed fingers drip with menace while a tattered hide masks its face, emphasizing that it cannot see—only sense silence.
We are currently building our first level – The Forest – featuring the monster The Maw with AI that reacts to the player’s voice (voice sensing). The player explores with a single torch, staying away from the monster to survive.
Output
What's Next
Developing the fear algorithm to synthesize a fear score from live heart rate data.
Improving the artifact collection system for deeper gameplay.
With companies like Sony working on consoles that use players’ biometric data for in-game experiences, this game is a perfect add-on for the new technology.
