Wayward Harbor

Wayward harbor (also on itch.io) is a first-person horror game developed using Unreal Engine 4 during the "Group Project" course at DAE by Daniil Shashenkov, Christopher Null, Martijn Dhondt, Lars Korden, Gonçalo Oliveira and me

We also got an approval from DAE's publishing department and were able to release our game for free in Steam.

Work

  • Prototyping. We had a basic idea of what we actually want, but our lead designer, Daniil, wanted a special mechanic. It took us several iterations before we have decided to make a handheld mirror.
  • Movement which also includes the 2 level crouching system: you can crouch at any moment but the character also can crouch lower when near tables and partially obstructed passes.
  • The Mirror. It reflects things you can't see with just your eyes. But the main challenge was to make it feel like an actual handheld mirror.
  • Interactables and Inventory. It was a lot of fun for me to design and implement the system for interactions.
    As it can be seen in the game now, it consists of grabbable items (lever, boat battery, key) and item acceptors (gate's lever socket, battery charging station, lock).
    If an item acceptor have accepted the item, the acceptor can be interacted with using the installed item. The installed item can also be taken back after being used.
    I made this system in such a way so that its parts can be reused and utilized to make complex interactions.
    For instance, the lever can be installed at both the gate's lever socket and battery charging station. And the charging station consists of 2 acceptors: a socket for the battery to be charged and a socket for the lever, so you can crank it and charge the battery. It's a manual process.

An unused shader that could have been used for making the main mechanic instead of the mirror.

The Mirror demonstration.

An interaction with a kettle and a stove from the prototyping phase.

Results

The development of Wayward Harbor provided tons of fun and many challenges.
Working in a team, syncing with everyone, following our leader - this was some precious experience.
I also was able to work on the gameplay and interactable systems - which is my passion.
And, as a result of our work - we got released on Steam and received a lot of positive feedback from thousands of players around the world!