The End of the Road
My Roles in this Project
The End of the Road was a solo project for my final year at uni, and I developed every aspect myself, excepting the creation of some audio assets.
About the Project
This was my Honours project for university, meaning I spent most of a school year working on the design, proposal, development, and a dissertation.
My aim was to design a game that created a unique and specific emotional experience - that of walking a pilgrimage (based on my own experience with it). From there, I identified the core elements of this as a sense of physicality in walking, a connection with people, and being surrounded by a calming natural atmosphere. For the walking, I designed, prototyped and iterated a unique walking mechanic where you have to take one step at a time, alternating each foot. This had to feel natural, and so I ensured that it struck the line between interactive, yet not awkward or challenging. This made exploring the environment feel more physical, and created a sort of rhythm very similar to what happens when you've walked a long distance and are simply putting one foot in front of the other.
For the element of human connection, I couldn't create the level of depth as actually walking with other people, and so I decided to represent three 'philosophical ideals' of pilgrimage in each character you can encounter. Each presents you with their ideas, and then allows you to continue walking, thinking about the meaning behind your own pilgrimage. I think this is a large part of what happens on pilgrimage - you interact with others for a while and then spend most of your walk thinking for yourself.
Lastly, the environment itself was quite important - I focused on creating a natural environment that felt fairly realistic, but also used a simplistic art style with muted colours. With this combination I hoped to evoke the feeling of a natural and calming environment, stylistically representative of the real world, rather than replicative.
The final game is a meditative, atmospheric, and introspective experience for players, which players I presented it to responded very positively to.
- Direction and production - Taking the game from pre-vis through to prototyping, development, iteration, and a final product while keeping a cohesive design and vision and working under a deadline.
- Design work - Using writing, mechanics and level design to achieve a specific emotional experience as a design goal. Resulted in the design of a world, interactive characters with dialogue, and a unique "rhythmic" walking mechanic.
- Programming - Using GDScript and Godot's shader language, I developed all the mechanics and systems needed for the game, and programmed custom shaders for its artstyle.
- 3D Modeling - Sculpted custom terrain and created a variety of modular 3D assets to be used in the game.
- Misc. - UI design, audio design, and a variety of other extra bits and bobs - basically whatever else was needed to create the final game.
About the Project
This was my Honours project for university, meaning I spent most of a school year working on the design, proposal, development, and a dissertation.
My aim was to design a game that created a unique and specific emotional experience - that of walking a pilgrimage (based on my own experience with it). From there, I identified the core elements of this as a sense of physicality in walking, a connection with people, and being surrounded by a calming natural atmosphere. For the walking, I designed, prototyped and iterated a unique walking mechanic where you have to take one step at a time, alternating each foot. This had to feel natural, and so I ensured that it struck the line between interactive, yet not awkward or challenging. This made exploring the environment feel more physical, and created a sort of rhythm very similar to what happens when you've walked a long distance and are simply putting one foot in front of the other.
For the element of human connection, I couldn't create the level of depth as actually walking with other people, and so I decided to represent three 'philosophical ideals' of pilgrimage in each character you can encounter. Each presents you with their ideas, and then allows you to continue walking, thinking about the meaning behind your own pilgrimage. I think this is a large part of what happens on pilgrimage - you interact with others for a while and then spend most of your walk thinking for yourself.
Lastly, the environment itself was quite important - I focused on creating a natural environment that felt fairly realistic, but also used a simplistic art style with muted colours. With this combination I hoped to evoke the feeling of a natural and calming environment, stylistically representative of the real world, rather than replicative.
The final game is a meditative, atmospheric, and introspective experience for players, which players I presented it to responded very positively to.