Client
Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)
Location
Savannah, GA
Year
2022
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A Master Witchhunter, Wald, and his young apprentice, Thilo, are on a hunt. As the sun sets, they're forced to stay the night in an isolated mining village, Willowtown. When dawn breaks, Wald is nowhere to be found. Thilo must investigate the peculiar town, search for clues, and unearth what crawls beneath. Use your wits, skills, and weapons as a witchhunter to find Wald. Unravel the mystery of Willowtown and face the horrors that lurk below... and beyond.
DARK SKIES of WILLOWTOWN is an upcoming title from CAT BEAR GAMES. Combining elements of mystery, adventure, and challenging combat, DSOW aims to bridge the gap between combat focused Souls-likes, and narrative focused RPGs, resulting in an experience that is suspenseful, satisfying, and emotionally connected.
This was my senior capstone project at SCAD. Leading a team of 12 students, I spent approximately 6 months from pre to post production working tirelessly to create this project. While it wasn't necessary in order to pass the class, we opted to make a full length game with the ultimate goal of publishing on Steam. I am incredibly proud of my team, the project, and the fact that we will be realizing that goal this coming fall.
DARK SKIES OF WILLOWTOWN
Video Edited by Lillie Tuttle and Tanner Wells, Sound by Jason Scalfano and HyunWoo Kim
On Dark Skies of Willowtown, I was the Project Lead / Product Owner. After coming up with the initial concept for the game, it was my job to keep the vision intact through 6 months of work and 12 other designers opinions and insight. I had never tackled a project like this, but quickly learned how to operate in the sink-or-swim nature of developing a large project. By the end of initial development, I had a hand in the creation of almost every aspect of the game, and largely learned the strengths and weaknesses in myself and my team and how to utilize them best to produce the best thing we could in the time we had without sacrificing the overarching vision. This process started with as much concept art as I could muster.
I pumped out concept art and narrative elements at the beginning but continued consistently through production, as we didn't have time to waste. We used an agile workflow (SCRUM) to accomplish this project in an organized way that would lower the chance of crunch time and help us produce viable, testable iterations of our game as we went. Part of this was finishing smaller slices of the overall workload weekly. In my case, I was concepting, modelling or sculpting and texturing assets for specific areas, creatures every week. All this, while writing the majority of dialogue and quest structure, creating sound and music and compiling the Art Bible. It was the most intense work schedule I've ever experienced, but also the most fun and most rewarding.
