Origin Unknown was my first project done in Unreal as well as the first one where I worked together with a full team of 10 people across different countries and time zones, overall it was a lot of firsts in terms of game development. The premise of the project was to build a full fledged game that could work as a portfolio piece for a team of artists just getting out of Think Tank Training Centre. We wanted to replicate as much as possible a professional workflow and pipeline so we relied on triple A ready tools like Perforce and Jira for the development of the game. In hindsight, most of the production choices we made were definitely overkill for the size of project we could muster given everybody came from either an academic background or had about a year of working experience. In this project I worked on building the entire AI enemy system, reading upon and trying to replicate a lot of what I had seen in Alien Isolation with the Xenomorph AI, since the game also revolved around one bigger stalking the player in the first phase of development. To do so I took up Unreal’s Behavior Tree to expedite iterations over the AI behavior. I also worked on the interaction systems needed for the environment such as doors, inventory management and object collection as well as the progression system for the game, as it relied on tracking the user’s object to trigger new quests and missions. We released it free on steam and you can play it here!
Shoutout to all the great people I worked with along the way: