Project Overgrown | Unreal Engine Game (May 2022)

I've recently had the opportunity of collaborating in a small team with students from other animation courses at my university. For this group project, I pitched a game idea and was selected to lead the team as the director of what was to become Project Overgrown.

Within this project I have had to wear many hats, handling general and technical direction, game/level design, programming, shader development, lighting, custom tool creation, as well as cinematic work and modeling. I lead the team through the whole game development pipeline and took care of assembling everything in Unreal Engine 4, from the gameplay logic to the procedural animation, UI, audio, VFX, and art assets. I have also created documentation for all of the aspects of the development process, describing asset creation rules and indications in order to create optimized and game-ready resources as efficiently as possible, as well as creating custom tools in Houdini to save time by making use of proceduralism.

The project is a Sci-Fi puzzle-exploration game, with narrative touches, following the quest of a small drone rebooting a century after the fall of a highly technologically advanced society, only to find the mechatronic world around it overtaken by nature and time. The player has to navigate through the debris of the environment and solve puzzles by manipulating the ancient machinery around, as well as using technological parts to either upgrade themselves or interact with the environment in various ways. As the player reaches the top floor of the factory they've been exploring, they finally see the true wreckage of the city, and the game ends with a powerful earthquake hitting the building.