LIGHTBORNE

Focus:
Blender
2D (Concept)
3D Modelling
Rigging
Animation

One of Valla Game Education’s last courses during year one was Animation, a course I was highly anticipating, a discipline I took to despite never having done it prior to my studies.

Lightborne was almost a year-long effort, starting conceptually as a character sheet during the 2D course, transforming into a 3D model during the 3D course, with rigging added before eventually a number of animations were developed for the character.

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LUMINOTHS

Focus:
Blender
Geometry Nodes
Scene-Building
Storytelling

While Luminoths wasn’t my first foray into Blender (it was my third at the time), it was the product of going through countless guides and tutorials on how to build an atmospheric scene with some added storytelling.

In the end, a combination of fog, lighting, an ocean modifier, a buoy (Sketchfab), mysterious orbs (Geometry Nodes), ominous music, eerie sound effects (Pixabay) and a simple narrative idea, all came together in the shape of the short video you see above.

VEILED

Focus:
Unreal Engine
Scene-Building
DaVinci Resolve

This project was my introduction to Unreal Engine. Having never used the engine before, the scene was put together using landscapes, water bodies and Quixel Megascans assets.

Once the scene was built, the next step involved lighting and camera work, before recording and editing everything together with the addition of sound effects (Pixabay) in DaVinci Resolve.

STORIES OF THE RUST BELT

Focus:
Narrative Design
Storytelling
Logo
Web Design (Partially)

Stories of the Rust Belt is an exercise in narrative design — a space to explore voice, pacing, worldbuilding, character perspective, storytelling, and writing without the pressure of a full game production pipeline.

It’s an attempt to tell stories while adhering to the rules of an existing world (ARC Raiders by Embark Studios), and to explain gameplay mechanics through lore, working both within set boundaries and gaps left open for speculation, imagination and creative freedom.

It’s the melding of canon with non‑canon fiction, for the sole purpose of learning and experimentation.

CHEKHOV’S SHOTGUN

Focus:
Unity
UI Toolkit
Programming (C#)
Figma
Affinity
2D

Chekhov’s Shotgun was the birthchild of a fellow student at Valla Game Education. Taking inspiration from a YouTube video, the premise of the game puts you in control of a shotgun-wielding cat.

While the main mechanic of the game revolved around movement and traversal of the weaponised cat through a city-inspired platforming level, my focus was on UI specifically, creating a functioning main menu, pause menu and game over end screen.

Figma was used for prototyping the menus, UI Toolkit was used for implementing it, and C# was the language used to code it in Unity. All of which were first-time for me.

Logo design, custom cursor and additional 2D graphics were also contributions, designed in Affinity.