Tales from an Electric Forest (VR)

Explore, protect, and restore a surreal electric bioluminescent forest made of cables and wires in this VR game where you control an electric deer and its lightning bug friends.

Controls:

Action	Control
Move yourself	Hold grip button to grab the world and pull yourself in any direction. Alternate: thumbstick up/down for forward back, thumbstick left/right to snap turn. The grab-the-world movement is recommended.
Control deer	Hold left trigger and the deer will run towards your left pointer. Move the tip of the pointer upwards in a swift motion to jump.
Control lightning bugs	Hold the right trigger and the lightning bugs will fly to your right pointer.
Electric Arc	After a certain point in the story (not accessible in the game jam build), holding both triggers will create a shocking electric arc between the deer and the lightning bugs. Use it to zap the blackout blights until they disappear.

Note: There's no scripted ending yet so if you've re-lit most of the forest and there are no blackout blights left, then you've won for now.

Behind the scenes: Made in 9 days for VR Jam 2, this game explores the theme of "electricity", by placing you in a bioluminescent electric forest, with electric animals, in a world made entirely out of wires, cables, monitors, and LEDs. You create an electric arc between the deer and the lightning bugs to zap the blackout blights. This game was mostly an aesthetics/art experiment and learning exercise on using Unreal Engine. I only started work on the storyline in the final hour of the jam.

All the 3D art except for particle effects are hand drawn in OpenBrush in VR, then exported to Blender for cleaning/rigging/animation, and then put together and brought to life in Unreal Engine 5.4.2.

Third-party Attributions:

Music: Away by Meydän (CC-BY); Elk by Meydän (CC-BY); Party Complex by Kevin MacLeod (public domain). Sounds: Robot/Machine Malfunction (CC0) by  Mr_KeybOred; Electric Arc Sparks by Wakerone (CC0), Thundex by Josh74000MC. Voice: generated with play.ht.