A pigeon with a remote control, sitting staring into the distance.

Daniel Mathews

Hi, my name is Dan and I'm a student at Brighton University who is studying game development. I'm interested in working with narrative design, character design and concept art.

Project: New World

A visual novel where you wake up in the Office of The Gods and are tasked to build a new world from memories of the old...

An image of a skull with 'W.T.D' written on it in the corner
A pale girl with light short hair stood infront of a background of a small town. She looks nervous.

Copper Forest (DEMO)

A visual novel started as part of a game jam. I worked on the Backgrounds, character design and narrative collaboratively.

Character Designs
& Concept Art

Miscellaneous character designs from a variety of personal projects.

An image of a scene in a cave, its mostly dark aside from a light in the middle pointing at a shadowy figure who is distorted with a blue glow. They are crouching protectively over a body that is covered in flowers.

Copper Forest (Demo)

A deer and a dove skull at the bottom of a well with flowers and the text 'well well well'

Copper Forest is a game made by a small team as part of 'My First Game Jam 2023' and was made using RenPy. We wanted to make a visual novel set in a sleepy 1950s inspired town where the player has to uncover a mystery.I mainly worked on the backgrounds and also designed the character Arlene, as well as contributing to the narrative. For the game jam a demo was made as a proof of concept.Below is an early character design for Arlene, who is your closest friend and companion in the game. There is also some early concept art from when we were figuring out the aestetic and tone of the game.

Concept art of Arlene, a girl with darker skin wearing an orange shirt and checkered skirt. She wears and necklace and an orange hat aswell as boots. Smalled in the image is another image of her with a height comparison to Helen.
A pale girl with brown hair sits on a roof in the dark. There is a metal structure behind her and she holds something that is glowing orange

Project: New World

A screenshot from the game Project: new world. Three characters are present, on the left is a short man with red hair. A text box of his dialogue reads: 'Alan: Because you're the chosen one, destined to save the world from its own destruction.' Two other p

This project was part of a Narrative Design module in my second year of University. We were tasked to design a game with an emphasis placed on creating a unique and interesting narrative.For this project me and three other people made a visual novel game using Ren'Py. The game starts with the player waking up in a liminal office space completely alone. Through exploration they find others who reveal themselves as gods, with the player being the newest among their ranks. They are set the task of building a new world by exploring memories of the old and picking what they wish to keep and what to remove.The game focuses on the decisions made in those memories as the other gods are quick to criticise and push their own thoughts onto the player. It is up to you how you respond and what world you build because of it. It is also up to you if a new world is built at all...For this project I helped to manage the overall direction of the game, keeping game design and character design documents up to date and relevant. I helped build the structure of the scripts to ensure they were consistent and easy to follow as well as writing aproximately half the scenes in the game. I made most of the art, and in the future plan on making all the art original. I also contributing to the technical side, working to fix bugs and maintain the project.The game can be found on my Itch. It is still in development mainly in terms of updating art, fixing grammatical errors and bug fixing.

Character Designs

I have been making and designing characters since I was a teenager, and below are just some of the characters I have designed. Some are more one off and exist in their own vaccum whilst others came about from table top games and other forms of story telling.If you want to see more I post all my art on my Instagram.

An image of a character 'Cier' from three perspectives. He has a deer skull for a head and wears a dark green robe.
An image of a scene in a cave, its mostly dark aside from a light in the middle pointing at a shadowy figure who is distorted with a blue glow. They are crouching protectively over a body that is covered in flowers.
A character called Esme, she has short brown hair and loose clothing. She has a big green hat and lots of eyes decorating her clothes. she is holding a book with an eye on the cover and she has a peaceful smile.
Rough sketches of a character, she has very long red hair, multiple piecings and wears casual clothes. in the top left drawing she looks smug, in the bottom left she looks happy and the bottom right angry. in the top right she is drawn as a child.
Two characters falling, one of them is yellow and is wearing pyjamas and fantasy clothes, the man on the right is more clearly wearing pyjamas and is coloured in blue. a green string attaches them and they look to be falling with lanterns in the background