Sunderland

The original builds of Sunderland have been lost, but fortunately I had the project files. For the Berlin Halloween Jam that I co-hosted in 2025, I brought it back from the dead. The game is available here to play. It took a few days to get everything working again. It's not in VR anymore (I will implement VR support when I have time). It still has some issues, especially with the touch screen controls. There are a few features (an animation at the end) that I have to bring back still.

Here is a bit about the development of the game:

At some point in 2014 my friend Jacob Rangel (who had a company called Museville) and I started collaborating on a VR project. I had wanted to do a silent film inspired game, and separately I wanted to do a 3rd person game. Jacob came up with the idea to merge the two ideas. He served as designer, writer, and director for the project. The programming was done by another friend of his, Michael Garber, and myself.

Jacob came up with a story for the game, which he named Sunderland. In the game you play as Bosworth, a servant of Dracula, who must protect his sleepwalking master as he moves through his castle. The castle has been breached by angry villagers bent on slaying the Count.

A lot of things changed during the development process and we decided to wrap things up around April 2015. We distributed the game for the Oculus Rift DK2, which was fairly new at the time.

Here is the content from the website for the game from back in 2015 (actually it is from before we released the game):

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Sunderland

Sunderland is a third person action/puzzle game for consumer VR HMDs. The game utilizes multiple fixed camera positions so that the user can view the action from different positions without experiencing the nausea that is often induced by a moving camera. The fixed camera positions also give us the opportunity to adorn the area immediately surrounding the viewer with objects to amiplify the stereo effect (in VR, the stereo effect is most pronounced for objects close the the viewer).

The game takes place in the Count's once grand, now crumbling, castle tucked deep in the Moldavian mountains. During the day, the Count sleepwalks through the castle and puts himself in peril. Villagers, bent on exacting revenge on the Count, have started breaking in through the castle's failing defenses. The rooms are littered with traps meant for such intruders, but while the Count sleepwalking he is not capable of navigating around the traps.

You play Bosworth, the Count's dedicated assistant. Your objective is to clear obstacles in the Count's path as he walks through the castle.