The Archipelago Promise

Explore a forgotten Archipelago deep in the Bering sea. Sail the cold seas, learn about the environment, evade the dangerous wildlife, and survive the harsh Alaskan weather to find your lost brother.

This game was created as part of game design studies at Breda University of Applied Sciences.

The Archipelago Promise is still in development and is planned to be released on Steam in July 2023.
As such, this page is still WIP and will be updated as the work progresses.

Engine: Unreal 5

Team size: 24

Development duration: 32 weeks 2022-2023

Role: Game designer

Main Responsibilities

As a game designer, I collaborated with animators, VFX artists and programmers to design the camera and character movement:

As a first-person game, the camera-character relationship has both pros and cons. The pros are that the camera has a lot more potential to be immersive, as it is the player’s ‘eyes’. The cons are that it can also make it feel like we’re a walking camera and not a person. As such, my goal was to create a realistic and immersive character-camera dynamic.

Designed and implemented the 3C’s

Camea animations for character movement on land

Camera animations and post process effects for player damage

Camera animation and post process effects for low health

Camera animation for player's death

Established and developed the theme and world-building of the game

I collaborated with other designers to establish a theme and the emotions we aim to convey in the game.

I flashed out the world-building by writing character sheets that include the lore behind the 2 main characters so that other members of the team can use it to answer potential questions throughout the development.

As a narrative designer, I worked alongside level designers to write the clues for the player to find across the island in the form of diary entries which help them figure out where to go next and give them backstories for the characters, their relationship, and their goals.

Implementation of the narrative included designing systems to support the gameplay.

To convey the feeling of an inner monologue, I create a typewriter behavior that displays one character at a time, as if it’s being written in real time.

Adding a skipping function and allowing closing the notebook while listening to the voiceover. I wanted to give players more choices, I didn’t want players to get ‘stuck’ on a note and to allow them to continue playing.

After the note voiceover ends, the player’s character will comment on what he just read, repeating the most important part to help guide the players even if they skipped it.

Design and implement the narrative

Narrative beats breakdown (click to open in new page)

Diary enteries

  • Blocking out the scene space and camera movement

  • Establish scene flow and timing

  • Customizing the lenses

  • SFX, VFX, props, color correcting

  • Rendering and editing in post

  • Implementation in engine

Story boards (click to open in a new page)

Script (click to open in new page)

Motion capture shoot

  • Blocking out the scene space and camera movement

  • Establish scene flow and timing

  • Customizing the lenses

  • SFX, VFX, props, color correcting

  • Rendering and editing in post

  • Implementation in engine

Intro scene

The first impression the player has of the game.

My goal with this scene is to introduce the main characters, their relationship, and their indevidual goals.

In the scene we jump from present to past in the form of flashbacks, which is conveyed through color grading, white fades, audio reverb.

I wanted the past and present to be distinct to one another - different weather, different time of day, different sail rotation.

Wrote, directed, edited and implemented cinematic sequences

To bring emphasis to specific narrative beats in the story, I created cinematic cutscenes using Level Sequencer.

The process incaluded:

Outro scene

What was unique about this scene was the camera movement data being imported from a virtual camera I operated during the motion capture shoot.

This allowed for smooth and realistic hand held camera movement with minimal menual keying.

Character sheet questions (click to open in new page)