DEEP CUTS

Creative Director | Narrative Director | Voice Director | Casting Director
(2025, Meta Quest / PCVR / PSVR2)

Take on the role of Elise Weber, co-founder of film production studio Lights Camera Faction, as they embark on a blockbuster quest to save their best friend and creative partner, Malcolm Micheaux, by venturing through the duo’s expansive film catalog. Relive all of LCF’s iconic and cinematic moments as you gain superpowers, and face off against a maniacal group of deprecated and deadly cartoon characters – The Learning Lads.

CONCEPT

For the past decade, Scythe Studios has found success by crafting immersive and innovative video games that push the boundaries of creativity, experimentation, and technical excellence, which is what led to our pivot from flatscreen to VR game design.

Wanting to bring a console level narrative single player experience to the medium, during preliminary research I identified two predominant genres on the platform:

• Softcore: physics and interactions driven sandbox experiences with finite space at the cost of narrative and scope such as Drunkn Bar Fight & Project Demigod

• Hardcore: expansive narrative and mechanics driven experiences with rich environments at the cost of physics and interaction such as Asgard’s Wrath 2 & Batman: Arkham Shadow

I wanted to synthesize these genres into a “midcore,” a wholly intractable and explorable world more akin to Bonelab/Boneworks that fuses physics chaos with the power of story. So I began the journey with only one note – to explore the world of film.

ASSEMBLY

After recognizing our primary approach, I moved onto the game’s framework – how would it function? Needing the ability to explore multiple genres, hub-and-spoke aligned best with our vision so I spent a week playing classic titles like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie analyzing their geography, flow, and frameworks.

Having established our framework, the question became – what do we do in these spaces? For this, I turned to skateboarding theory and how the skateboard functions as a unique critic of architecture. This is because I wanted to treat the VR player like a skateboard, capable of moving across all surfaces and redefining their surroundings through unrestricted creative freedom and interaction.

Finally, how do we make this meaningful? While reading about skateboarding I fell back in love with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series and its approach to environmental interaction, i.e., establish a casual setting, notate architectural objective markers, and imbue said objectives with chaos, movement, and story.

NARRATIVE

At this point, I had a hub-and-spoke game that was predicated on physics and chaos driven objectives that exploited their environments and promoted player freedom. Now, I had to apply the second layer – the narrative.

First, what is the hub and what are the spokes? For the hub, I landed on a magical retrofuturistic theater that allows the player to enter the screen into living film worlds making the spokes the movies themselves. 

Now, why are we here? We are an editor (the unsung hero of filmmaking) that must rescue our creative partner while still meeting an EOD deadline, with the theses of the game being the beauties and frustrations of creative collaboration as well as an intimate exploration of grief upon second playthrough.

This exuberant challenge then became figuring out the creative voices of our two protagonists and how those would look, sound, and feel over an entire body of work. For the single game, I had to write six entire films each maintaining their own ma within themselves and the greater narrative.

CHAPTER DESIGN

When designing the chapters, the first task was to define the genres. I watched about 600 films throughout the course of production, as staying as immersed as possible in the medium felt necessary. Rather than playing in broad spaces like drama, comedy, and action, I honed in on subgenres and movements like spaghetti western, film noir, and even Dogme 95.

I wanted to avoid stagnation and lulling the player in all senses, especially within VR as we are already asking so much more of the player than a traditional game. This meant giving each film its own unique rhythm while retaining the core gameplay loop.

For this, I broke down the chapter objectives into a template, meaning each film would contain   platforming, gunplay, melee, puzzle, wave-based, and cinematic levels. How we arranged these was influenced by the films themselves which created varied experiences, but by having the template ensured we still hit our primary gameplay marks.

In each film chapter you’d recreate the path of its primary protagonist, producing the feel of playing as multiple characters providing micronarratives on top of the metanarrative with every corner, drawer, nook and cranny having something to stimulate the player with, keeping them in the necessary flow state for extending playtime while promoting immersion and exploration.

ART DIRECTION

When writing and designing for multiple genres, there’s the challenge of nailing the specific feels for each chapter while maintaining gamewide design consistency. For the primary world, we went with a retrofuturistic aesthetic married with the classic golden age movie theater.

Once inside the films, we stylized each in line with their genre. For instance, the Wild West got a technicolor treatment like Johnny Guitar while film noir has a B&W palette with brief glimpses of color a la Sin City. 

Inside the game hub are movie posters for each of the films and boss fights, these were key assets as selling the films before entering them was important. I needed there to be a sense of realism and believability behind each of the images with the player wanting to not only see but play these experiences.

Finally, for the cinematics power wheel UI we went back to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and the general design of skateboarding wheels. Knowing the functionality behind the power – holding the X button and rotating the wrist L-R to choose the power – a circular design felt appropriate, with the final product being an image overlaid on a video glitch to reinforce the power and its connection to film.

CASTING & VOICE ACTING

The casting process for the game was entirely DIY as I scanned through numerous social media profiles and personal websites creating potential rosters for each character.

I am incredibly interested in discovering new voices as I believe there is an untapped fire there waiting to be sparked. Most importantly, it was about finding authentic and confident voices versus seemingly experienced actors with extensive resumes. 

For this audition process, each actor was sent character scripts and asked to send back recordings meeting specific guidelines to ensure workflow ability in addition to performance quality.

Lastly, the voice directing sessions were all completed live between myself and the actor. Our traditional method was to perform three takes and then pause for notes and either move on or try again. Every actor on the project besides the main trio were completed within a single hour recording session.

the final product

Our final game satisfied our primary goal of creating a midcore title that features an expansive single player narrative experience with physics interaction and interactable exploration. 

Deep Cuts premiered at Upload VR and debuted at the prolific VR Showcase. The game was released on March 11th, 2025 on Meta Quest 2/3/3S and has since maintained a 4+ star rating. It is slated for PCVR and PSVR2 release this year as well.

VICE: “Virtual Reality is starting to hit its stride. Allowing developers to get weirder and wilder than we could have ever imagined. Deep Cuts is the culmination of all of this wackiness brought to life. By entering fictitious B-Movies that totally exist and living out dream scenarios through them. It’s right up my alley in every way, shape, and form. It’s also one of the most entertaining and well-written games I’ve played in VR, offering a great campaign and plenty of sights and sounds to see and experience. There’s really nothing quite like this one, and I can’t wait for folks to fall in love with it.”