Showcasing Kaiju Fury VR at the Academy of Art University – GDC Week Spotlight

Last Monday and Tuesday (March 17–18), I had the opportunity to showcase Kaiju Fury VR—a student-led game development project—at the Academy of Art University during GDC week! Check out the video recap.

Kaiju Fury VR is the result of months of hard work, collaboration, and iteration. What makes this project stand out is our team’s technical ambition. We’ve been working with multiple external dependencies to create a fully immersive VR experience, including:

• The KATVR treadmill + sensor shoes for full-body locomotion

• The Meta Quest 3 headset with hand tracking support

• A haptic feedback vest that lets players feel the impact of in-game events

• All developed inside Unreal Engine 5

  
  

So, what’s the game about?

Players take on the role of cleaners who are sent to exterminate Kaiju after a breakout at a biochemical research facility called Hayata Lab. Armed with a pistol in one hand and fireballs in the other, players explore the ruined lab and prepare to face off against the final boss Kaiju—at least, that’s the plan!

For GDC week, we had to pause development and build a vertical slice of the game—a short demo to showcase. The demo ends with the boss Kaiju spotting the player through a lab window. He lets out an angry roar, then slams his massive arm into the building. The screen fades to black as the sound of destruction and collapse echoes around you- in the full game, we can the player to actually see themselves falling out of the building and landing into the Kaiju boss arena. You can watch our dev playtesting walkthrough below ↓

Presenting the game alongside my talented team was such a proud moment. After working on this project for several semesters, it had started to feel repetitive—same hardware issues, losing and gaining teammates, and re-treading familiar ground. At times, it felt like we weren’t moving forward or moving very slow.

But seeing people play the game and react to it in real time reminded me exactly why I love game development. What’s become “normal” to us is incredible to new players, and that fresh perspective brought the spark back.

It was also great reconnecting with fellow students, faculty, and industry guests—hearing feedback, sharing ideas, and celebrating each other’s work.

We’re aiming to finish Kaiju Fury VR by the end of this semester (this May), and I’ll be sharing updates and dev logs regularly on my portfolio page for anyone who wants to follow along.

Thanks so much to everyone who stopped by to check it out and the faculty members who made all this possible!!