A new take on the metroidvania genre: a top-down, 3D adventure set in a world of science and magic.
MY ROLE: Game director (technical and creative) from 2019-2023.
Every piece of code in this trailer was architected or executed by me in some fashion: AI, motion, interest management, optimization. If it's in here, I was responsible for it.
A core tenant of the metroidvania genre is a wide variety of unique enemies: but with a small team this presented a challenge. To work around it, I established a code framework that systematized enemy AI by increasing levels of specificity.
With the AI systems guiding content creation, it enabled dramatically varied enemies to be created with just a few lines of code, ensuring both gameplay stability and an easy framework in which the team could create an incredible variety of enemies with ease.
But an easy-to-use enemy AI system does us no good if art becomes a blocker: I personally established the art direction and pipeline for the game's many creatures, and created key examples as reference for the team, from concept to implementation, ensuring that we could create varied, beautiful enemies with minimal cost and resources.
Fully-voiced cutscenes were established as a critical goal early on by stakeholders: a steep challenge for even well-established teams.
To enable the team to quickly and easily create complex, fully voiced cutscenes, I created an auto-parser system that relied on a custom markup language to convert the writer's script files into cutscenes, allowing the animation team to quickly iterate, refine, and tweak cutscenes while being assured that subtitles were accurate, voice lines synced automatically, and changes could be viewed on the fly.
Everything starts with concept art: a vision to be brought to life with a process. A unified look and feel that takes the themes, needs, and technical constraints of a project into consideration from day one.
But without a system for execution, concepts are nothing: a robust and carefully constructed pipeline brings it all to life, backed up by equal parts technical tools and refinement of art direction.
Every piece of the world was constructed from hyper-modular part kits, reducing performance requirements and freeing the level designers to create spaces to their heart's content: eliminating the need for them to depend on the art team for regular updates.
The project unfortunately fell prey to the industry-wide cuts and recessions of 2023 and was shelved close to completion.