Arcanum

An atmospheric horror game completed for my university course at the NCCA which was completed with four other students (and two external composers/sound designers) over four months using Unreal Engine 4. A shipwreck of a large cruise vessel was discovered at a depth of 3000 meters. No shipwreck of this size and model had ever been recorded and you, the player, are sent to dive into this wreckage to explore how it came to be at this record-breaking depth. You realize the ship isn’t anything like you could have imagined and that you may not be the only living thing on this ship.

Arcanum was envisioned and pitched by Robert Poncelet and approved by the unit leader for the assignment. We did not decide who was going to be in our groups so as to closely simulate the working practices of a commercial production, specifically working with people we may have no previous repertoire with. Our groups where decided by specifying the skills you are confident in and areas you want to focus on for this assignment in a pro-forma that was handed to the unit leader. Each group leader, or each person who pitched an idea, asks for certain skills people have to create their project, to which these people get randomly assigned to start production by the unit leader. I was the director of Arcanum after Robert pitched his idea.

A large portion of my work on Arcanum was setting up a pipeline for the content being produced by all five of the asset producers. I also had to deal with setting up a content management system using Perforce to allow for us to all work on the same project files simultaneously. I also worked on blocking out the ship design interior, creating a basic real-time Inverse Kinematic system for the Dybbuk (enemy creature), cloth simulation for the Dybbuk dress using NVIDIA Apex, some small amounts of modelling and texturing as well as some code using Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint.