God of Crabs

3 Months

Timeline

Blueprints

Language

Unreal

Engine

Team Size

Design

Development

Contributions

Welcome to [CORP] - Where Productivity Is Mandatory and Corporate Enrichment Is… Strongly Encouraged.
As a proud middle-management operative (*title may not reflect actual importance), you’ll sift miner reports, maintain your charmingly crumbling remote facility, and keep Head Office happy enough not to vaporize you.

Each “day” (legally distinct from actual time) brings new tasks, suspicious data from other sites, and the creeping realization that you might be part of something much bigger... and much worse.

Complete your duties, uncover the truth, and whatever you do: don’t rack up three strikes. HR calls it “An Extended Furlough.”

Project

God of Crabs is a psychological cosmic horror game developed in Unreal Engine by a team of four designers. Players take on the role of an indentured facility worker navigating a darkly comedic, dystopian corporate environment.

The core gameplay loop is divided between active facility maintenance and narrative-driven deduction mechanics. Players must moderate daily communications and sift through site reports from similar remote sites, checking for data inconsistencies. By piecing together these reports, players slowly uncover the tragic stories of other facilities falling to cosmic madness or corporate purges, all while frantically managing their own daily tasks to avoid racking up three strikes and facing their own purge.

Turns out, extracting the blood of a cosmic god on an industrial level is a bad idea.

A major goal for the design team was establishing a suffocating and disorienting, yet darkly humorous atmosphere. We leaned heavily into the juxtaposition of mundane corporate bureaucracy masking eldritch horror, while also establishing the player character as an unreliable narrator whose psyche is actively breaking. We achieved this primarily through a level-shifting mechanic where environment elements move, appear, or disappear when the player looks away. This effect triggers more frequently as the days pass, creating unique opportunities for disorienting level design and psychological narrative beats.

My Role

PC System: Because the in-game PC is the focal point of every daily loop, I designed its interface to be as tactile and toy-like as possible. Drawing inspiration from analogue technology and cassette-futurism, I intentionally built an obtuse, clunky user experience. The task of moderating the site comes from specific edicts in place by management, such as 'Reject any messages from sites not hitting production quota' or 'Approve all messages from site XC-4S'. Forcing the player to learn the system and grounding them in the mundane reality of the corporate facility before the horror elements take over, whilst also delivering the majority of narrative events. And who doesn't love clicky buttons?
Scene Change System: To achieve the psychological horror elements we wanted, I developed a highly flexible scene-shifting system in Unreal Engine. I built the logic to handle multiple use cases, from micro-level object toggling (making single props appear or disappear behind the player's back) to macro-level environment replacement that completely swaps out entire rooms to shatter the player's spatial awareness.
Core Loop Structure: I structured and implemented the underlying logic for the daily maintenance loop. This required building a dynamic task manager that tracks player progress, gates progression to the next day until corporate quotas are met, and provides clear, updating task Board objectives to keep the player focused on their duties amidst the escalating horror.
Level Design: I designed and implemented the final level of the game, with the aim of displaying the protagonist's complete psychological collapse into the physical space. To achieve this, I used the scene-change system heavily to build disorienting set pieces that actively disorientates them. I also created a corrupted, inescapable version of the PC task, stripping away the player's agency and forcing them into a narrative climax where their only option is to approve every message and broadcast the truth of the Crab God.

Tools Used

Confluence, Trello, Unreal Engine 5