Deceptive Reality

Overview

Deceptive Reality is a VR title for the Meta Quest platform. Set in a rain-soaked, neon-lit retro-futuristic city, it tells a dark revenge story through immersive first-person gameplay blending intense action combat with narrative-driven story sequences.

The project was led solo — covering everything from environment art and engine work to coordination of an external outsourcing team. Backed by over €300K in fundraising and reaching 80K+ installs, it stands as a full commercial release built with a lean, distributed team.

Responsibilities

• Solo development lead — engine, design, scripting, art, and release
• Coordinated external outsourcing team of 10 across character art, voice over, music, and script writing
• Game design & level design — layout, pacing, action and story encounters
• Lighting, environment art & custom shaders
• Animation system & character scripting
• VR interaction framework built in Blueprints
• Performance optimisation for Meta Quest 2
• Trailer production & promotional assets

Technical Highlights

• Custom VR interaction system — grab, throw, and melee combat built entirely in Unreal Blueprints with haptic feedback tuned per interaction.
• Dynamic NPC behaviour logic — patrol, alert, and combat states driven by a lightweight behaviour tree designed for Quest-level performance.
• Modular environment workflow — tileable props and geometry sets allowed rapid level iteration while maintaining strict draw-call budgets.
• Shader-based atmosphere — custom post-process materials and emissive grading to achieve the tech-noir look within mobile GPU constraints.
• Professional voice acting for lead roles — cast and directed through external talent, integrated with the in-engine dialogue and cutscene system.

Challenges

• Balancing visual fidelity with the strict performance envelope of the Quest 2 — every asset required LOD consideration and texture compression passes.
• Maintaining narrative immersion through sound design and pacing without the safety net of a dedicated audio team or composer.
• Assembling a project of this scope entirely solo — the hardest challenge was knowing when to cut a feature versus when to push through.
• Maintaining consistent asset quality across an entire game proved to be one of the steepest challenges. While some individual assets reached a solid standard, replicating that quality at the volume required was unsustainable without a more structured texturing pipeline. This exposed clear gaps in the workflow that have since informed a much more deliberate approach to asset production and tooling.