2018
Inspired by the visuals and sound of the Playstation 1, The Empty City is a story focused adventure game where you explore sunken buildings, overun underpasses, flooded streets and a hill overlooking a city with a story to tell.
This game was made in Unreal Engine 4 for the End Of The World game jam from 12th June to the 31st July: https://itch.io/jam/the-end-of-the-world.
"It's a captivating experience with a very atmospheric soundtrack and fantastic use of it's retro PS1 aesthetic."
"This game has captivated me for a variety of reasons. Not only that I’m a big lover of the old PlayStation graphics" ... "but also the whole scenario just feels right."
Game Jam Curator
This was the first title that I publicly released that utilised my learnings about narrative in level design and environment art. By using an aesthetic that invokes the stylings of older generations of games, I was able focus on the narrative impact of the scene over the visual fidelity, as well as inspire a feeling of unease, age and weathering to the experience, as everything is hard to see from a distance and shudders according to the emulated limitations of older hardware.
For the game's design, I focused on framing set pieces for each emotional narrative beat, using colour, lighting, elevation and shaping, so that each moment's emotion it wants to convey can do so as strong as it can while being non-verbally and doesn't impact the pace of the experience.
I also learned a lot about gameplay accessibility by building for a low-end, easily accessible web platform as well as using a mouse only input, allowing more people to play the game. I wanted this as I felt that the experience was best for a wider audience that may not have the high-end hardware.