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Take Me Home

Story:

'Take Me Home' is a light-hearted 2.5D narrative-driven stealth game, where you play as a reaper that's been locked out of hell after experiencing a change of heart and refusing to reap the soul of a young boy. Sneaking your way around the market by hiding and possessing the townspeople, you'll need to collect certain several items with which you can perform a spell that'll take you home, all the while avoiding the religious fanatics roaming around the town.

Inspirations:

Gameplay took a lot of inspiration from games like Oxenfree, and Metal Gear Solid. The Art Style was based on several stylized games such as Firewatch, Dustborn, Life is Strange, and Winter Project, which have a low-poly / toon-shaded look to them.

My Role & Collaborators:

For this project, I worked in a team of 3, and so I personally had 5 main roles: Narrative & Game Design, Concept Art, 2D Backgrounds, Programming, and Cutscenes & Cutscene Animation.

Narrative & Game Design: My teammates and I each pitched an idea, and once we settled on which one to go with, together we set about fleshing out the idea - developing the tone, story beats, and characters until we were satisfied and ready to continue.
Concept Art: This included drawing out the environment, characters, and storyboards, the former two which would be used as reference when putting together the environment and modelling the characters, and the latter used later while I animated the cutscenes.
2D Backgrounds: The style of 2.5D game we wanted to create was having everything in the foreground be 3D while everything in the background 2D (similar to Oxenfree), and so I created 2 of the 3 backgrounds that were used in the game.
Programming: The code for the game was split up between the team; the main part I worked on was the stealth mechanic (hiding, possessing the townspeople, and the behavior of the religious fanatics (spotting, chasing you, returning to their start positions)).
Cutscenes & Cutscene Animation: Using Unity's Cinemachine feature, I put together the 3 intro cutscenes (the main introduction, and the two options that followed it) and both ending cutscenes. I learnt a lot from this process, and despite the shortage of time (all the cutscenes were animated and put together within 2 weeks), I am very happy with the result.

Above, you can watch a full playthrough of the game.

Below is some concept art of the characters & minigames, the backgrounds I worked on, screenshots of the cutscenes, animatics & storyboards, and some code excerpts.