Dark Skies of Willowtown
I was Lead Game Designer and Level Designer for my senior game project. In 20 weeks we created a fully fledged game featuring three environments, NPC investigations, numerous enemies, and two bosses.
Developed in 20 Weeks, 2022
Unreal Engine 4.27
Team: Ben Broer, Seth Butler, Liana Cannon, James Harris, Leo Leon, Ariana Santos, Jason Scalfano, Finn Schulman, Tanner Wells, Keyi Yang, Jingkun Zhang.
Town
Town
Town
Mines
Mines
Mines
Mirror Forest
Mirror Forest
Mirror Forest
Trailer
Story
When Wald, a master witchunter goes missing, it’s up to his apprentice, Thilo, to investigate the peculiar village of Willowtown, search for clues, and unearth what lurks beneath.
General Concept
DSOW is a third person, Souls-like mystery game driven by its narrative. Players start at the Inn and explore the town, eventually finding their way into the old mines. Talk to villagers, find clues, face strange creatures - and find out where they came from. To save Wald. the player must journey to unknown realms and defeat beings both familiar and incomprehensible.
Initial Blockout
For the initial blockout for the town, I worked with my level designer ben to look through numerous pictures and layouts of 16th century Slavic towns and architecture to get a feel for what our town should look like. We then mocked up a rough sketch of what the layout would look like, then we brought it into unreal and started working on it from there.
WIP
More to come.
Afterword
This was an amazing experience, to be able to work with such an amazing team on a game of this scale was a blast. Everyone worked so well together and we truly never had any issues besides our time management at the start! Overall it was a great learning experience for me, to see and be a part of every single aspect that goes into designing a game.