DEV STORIES: Outer Brain & Organ Quarter
Outer Brain is a three-man studio that just developed Organ Quarter, an awesome VR surrealist horror.
Tell us more about your company and how you got started developing at all.
Outer Brain got started about 4 years ago when my good friend Kory Powell and I were working on a small 2D action platformer game called Scum Lord. It wasn’t very exciting, but it was the first truly playable game that we had made and it inspired me to get back into programming. After that, I worked solo on a few personal projects including Lunatic’s Bane, a dark action RPG that I’ll be getting back to soon!
What got you started on the idea of Organ Quarter?
I was following the hype of the Oculus Rift development kit release for a while, but then one day I finally got a chance to try it myself. It was mindblowing, I knew immediately that it was the future. I got the Vive as soon as it released. There were a lot of really amazing and interesting experiences already, but they were all quite short. I wanted something more immersive, something long-form that I could lose myself in for a few hours and forget about reality. Organ Quarter was based on that idea of escape.
What were you doing before using Substance/Game Textures? How are Substance and GameTextures helping you now?
Before Game Textures, and before I knew what a substance even was, I was spending hours searching for images online that I would slop together. My normal maps were just lazily generated from gray-scale, and hight maps were some voodoo magic I didn’t quite understand. But then I looked through the Game Textures library, and there were hundreds of beautiful high-res substances with insane detail and custom sliders for me to easily tweak to my needs. Nearly every substance I downloaded had a rust slider, just bring that up and your horror texture is nearly complete!
Organ Quarter’s got some pretty twisted creatures in it! What sort of horror stuff inspires you? Or is it just random?
The most obvious influence would be Silent Hill and the designs of Masahiro Ito, although I went in a much more aggressive/less subtle approach with the creatures. Definitely oldschool 80' horror like David Cronenberg’s The Fly and John Carpenter’s The Thing, as well as just general horrors that relate deeply to my own personal life.
Any specific textures/substance materials that you’ve used frequently that you really enjoy or that we can see pretty specifically in your game?
There are a couple of rusty metal textures that are used in probably like…every room in the game haha. My favorite would definitely have to be the Yellowstone Acid Pools Wet, with a bit of recoloring it makes for an extremely satisfying meaty/gory material that I used quite a bit. In general, with a bit of creativity, you can repurpose a lot of seemingly normal Game Texture’s materials into whatever weird stuff that you need.
What’s next for OuterBrain? Anything you can share?
We still have a few patches planned for Organ Quarter, as well as a promised non-VR version, but after that I can safely say that we’ll be taking a break from horror for a little while. All that disgusting stuff can really start to weigh you down haha. However, I’m sure once I’m ready for it, there will be an Organ Quarter 2 that’s even more gross and personal, eventually!
