Title: Isles of Ferum
Genre: 2D Puzzle | Adventure Game
Studio: Aegis Studios
Team Size: 9
Engine: Unity (C#)
Timeframe: 8 Months
Isles of Ferum is a 2D narrative driven puzzle and adventure game that is being developed by a team of 8 led by me. It is focused on narrative driven puzzles that require clue gathering skills to complete the objectives. Its gameplay is inspired by the Monkey Island games. IOF currently has a demo released on itch.io.
My Roles & Contributions
Game Design & Art Direction Lead
• Creating team documentation and designing gameplay mechanics.
• Managing, overseeing design team as well as giving tasks to them.
• Bringing together different disciplines to fulfill the gameplay vision of the project.
• Employing an iterative design process supported by working on and prototyping the game in-engine.
• Creating various art assets for the project whilst working closely with and managing art team to design assets fitting the game style and vision.
Production Lead
• Overseeing production of everything related to IOF, from funding it to recruiting team members.
• Working together with team members to create schedules, define our objectives, and plan for producing everything required for the project.
• Play testing in Unity to ensure a smooth creation process and keeping track of bugs to be fixed.
• Assigning tasks to all team members and organizing weekly meetings to ensure our production pipeline runs smoothly, we are on schedule, amending the schedule if delays occur, and solving issues.
Narrative Design Lead
• Managing and creating all narrative related content for the project whilst meeting with team members to receive relevant input and feedback.
• Creating a world full of high quality content, characters, and relationships.
• Telling an engaging story using various toolsets for interactive, branching character dialogue and other player-facing messages.
Isles of Ferum is a game project I had been developing on my own during my spare time until 2022. I decided at that point to turn it into my senior project and have a team of trusted friends and university peers working under my direction and leadership to create a demo of this game, which we’ve completed. Now we work on fully developing it to launch it on Steam as an indie game.
My Design & Documentation Process
I aim for clear, concise documentation and communication of gameplay features and my designs. I often use graphs and other visual mediums supported by brief text.
Main Gameplay Loop
The core gameplay loop of IOF revolves around interacting with NPCs to experience the narrative aspects and combat scenarios of the game which feed into the puzzles of the game world.
The core gameplay loop is designed to have a fun narrative fueled experience for the player with enough variety in gameplay to not bore players, but also not too much breaks in between that it would alienate the target audience, fans of narrative focused games. We have further polished this in-game after playtesting.
Iterative Design Process
In all professional work I do, especially in design, I follow an iterative creation process. I first establish a good strong concept and re-iterate it until it is refined becoming a high quality product. This process also greatly helps collaboration, as my team mates can give feedback early on and throughout the process creating a more diverse and rich final product.
For this reason, brainstorming ideas, white boxing levels, making prototypes of gameplay mechanics by implementing my C# skills, and sketching designs are all important pieces of my process.
Yortenheim Tavern began with a sketch and through collaboration reached its final form!
Design Document Excerpts
My Narrative Design Process
The narrative design of IOF has been a long undertaking; it is based off of a world that I have been writing and building since I was in middle school. I employ the iterative process in my writing and value making detailed, well-thought out, and deep worlds, characters, and relationships when writing.
A few important considerations while crafting the narrative are making sure the interactions feel unique, thinking what would be fun for the player to experience, and what would be emotionally moving or motivating to the player.
Branching Storyline & Dialogue
As IOF is a narrative focused adventure, one of its key features is interactive branching dialogue and story. Depending on player choices, the interactions with NPCs and the wider story will unravel differently. We used the Fungus system for the dialogue of the game, as it was extremely helpful in creating this system and supporting branching dialogue.
Characters & Relationships
IOF features a rich cast of unique and original characters with their own ways of talking and expressing themselves. Various characters have different relationships with each other, and the world is fleshed out by being connected within itself thus feeling more convincing and immersive.
Dialogue Excerpt
(Full script and more writing examples available upon request)
