The Forager

The Forager is a 2.5D puzzle platform game where you play as a creature with botanical abilities that explores and traverses an infected forest. By exploiting the enchanted ways of the environment, the Forager must reach the heart of the forest, the Tree of Life, to unveil the reason behind this unexplained corruption. When conceptualising this project we were heavily influenced by the rich scenery and art of Ori and the Blind Forest, as well as the diverse puzzle elements of Trine. Our intentions when starting this project were to create an immersive and cohesive environment with unique and challenging game mechanics.

This project was completed for our Final Major Project over 9 months. My role was to work on the technical aspects of the game where as Tom Martyn worked on the artistic aspects and finally with the music and sound design by Andrew Thompson. The ethos behind our initial game idea was to have a story that would question the player’s motives in a way that they would not normally experience in day to day life. The main thought we wanted to have the player ponder was whether their life is any more valuable than another animal’s. This was deemed very difficult in the time we had due to the challenge of portraying a story without any kind of verbal narrative and doing so entirely with visuals.

All of the gameplay was completed using the Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint system. Noteworthy features are a fully customisable camera trigger blueprint that allows for changing of transitions and tracking of the player, vector field based particle effects, a complete Forager animation state machine, 2D platformer movement including sliding and wall jumping, possession system for controlling a butterfly, animated vines with complete collision and customisable paths, and lastly basic A.I. for the crawler NPC. All of this can be seen in the breakdown reel below.