Creating a Narrative-Driven First-Person Psychological Horror Game Set on an Isolated British Island
James Macleod, CEO of Vertpaint, joined us to discuss Ritual Tides, covering its inspiration, the story and visual direction, the type of horror players can expect, and how the development process has unfolded so far.
Introduction
While living in Edinburgh and working at Rockstar North, I got the itch to build a team of driven, ambitious developers. I later moved to Canada to join Digital Extremes, but that idea of building a slightly unhinged "special development force" never really left me. In 2019, I came back to the UK and started Vertpaint, trading a £90k salary for £13k. Financially questionable, creatively freeing!
Since then, we've grown to a team of 50+ senior developers who've worked together now across indie, AA, and AAA projects. Industry veteran Jonathan Berube has since dubbed the team "the SEAL Team of game development" (a quote anyone who's glanced at our LinkedIn is probably sick of by now!).
The long-term goal was always to get to a point where we could fund our own original IP. Ritual Tides has been in the works on the narrative side for years, so finally building it now feels a bit surreal in the best way.
Ritual Tides
I've always been drawn to the macabre. Dark stories, cults, and people caught up in forces way bigger than themselves have always fascinated me. I recall that even as a child, I felt compelled to make art focusing on the strangest topics, including, for example, Ipswich Murders, which probably says everything you need to know.
There's something about the weight and sadness of those kinds of stories that I find incredibly compelling as a foundation for storytelling. That fascination eventually became the backbone of Ritual Tides. The earliest version of this universe started as a story called Sheppards, which now sits later in the saga.
Ritual Tides works as an origin story, introducing players to the world, its underlying mythology, and its central antagonist. It serves as an origin story of sorts, the starting point for a much larger narrative universe that we hope players can lose themselves in.
The Story of the Game
Ritual Tides is a first-person horror game set in the late 19th century on a fictional British isle. Fans of survival horror and narrative-driven experiences will feel right at home. We draw strong inspiration from games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, titles that pair immediate, visceral horror with deeper, more unsettling narrative layers.
Our goal is to create an experience where players gradually uncover the island's secrets and keep thinking about it long after they've finished. Ideally, it's the kind of game that sparks discussion on online forums, where players dissect the story, debate theories, and uncover hidden details across a much wider universe.
The Visual Style
We're using a mix of proprietary, in-house workflows, all geared towards pushing immersion and realism as far as we can reasonably get away with. As a result, the game has developed a pretty distinct visual fingerprint, which mostly comes down to an almost unhealthy level of detail and care from the team. A lot is going on under the hood, and for anyone curious, we share quite a bit of behind-the-scenes content with our Discord community (join us).
Creation Process
Building a game using new methods and workflows naturally brings challenges, particularly around optimisation and cross-platform performance. Ritual Tides is incredibly ambitious for a studio of our size, but one of our biggest strengths is the team itself. We have spent years solving complex problems together across multiple projects, and that experience has been invaluable.
It allows us to approach challenges with confidence and a shared understanding of how to overcome them. Alongside all the proprietary tech we've been cooking up, we made the slightly dangerous decision early on to rethink how first-person systems should work. This led us to build our own custom rig/system from scratch to cater to our titles' specific mechanics/design needs.
The upside is that it lets us support procedural animation, which means movement, interaction, and traversal all feel a lot more dynamic and less "on rails" as a result. In terms of design, everything comes back to player engagement. We want players to stay present, slightly on edge, and never too comfortable. If you ever feel truly safe, we've probably done something wrong.
A fair bit is going on mechanically, including traversal, inventory management, collectibles, and both melee and ranged combat. That said, at its core, this is a horror game first and foremost. Everything else exists to serve that feeling.
Conclusion
I'll be honest, my perspective isn't necessarily the healthiest. I'm diagnosed and medicated for a condition called OCD. I bring this up not to farm sympathy (I have an insufferably happy disposition), but because it definitely shapes how I approach "things".
All this to say that my advice to beginner developers will most definitely lean toward an obsessive, all-in, addictive, and perhaps slightly unhealthy mindset. With that disclaimer out of the way, if you want to create something, whether it's a game, film, or novel, start by being brutally honest with yourself about what you care about.
If you can't stop thinking about it, if it feels like it needs to get out of you, that this thing has to exist, then accept that the odds are against you, and give yourself to that pursuit fully anyway. We have been incredibly lucky on our journey, no doubt. But I strongly believe in the idea that "the harder you work, the luckier you get."
For us, that has meant backing ourselves into a corner, making sacrifices, taking financial risks, and putting the vision above everything else. It is not easy, but if you do truly care about what you are building, then that obsessive "it has to get done" mindset, I believe, will at very least help!
