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...
Final Year Project
A puzzle platformer that was developed to research into environmental storytelling and how it can be best applied in narrative driven games.
Eden
A level of a FPS game where you travel through the caves of Lynion to help them and find the infamous Dr. Agnes Moroe
Final Year Project
For my dissertation project I looked into the question "Is Atmospheric Environmental Storytelling or Interactive Environmental Storytelling Better at Guiding Players in a 3D Puzzle Platformer?" To answer this a game demo was made showcasing both forms of envirnmental storytelling and users were surveyed on which path they picked to help determine which was more effective.For this project to be completed in a timely manner agile project management styles were used including a trello board to track activities that needed to be completed. With a focus on environmental storytelling their was also alot of design documentation that was made for both the narrative and gameplay elements.A video of the game can be seen here
Project: New World
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.
Eden, Level design project
For this project we had to work with a group to design a game and then between the members of the group focus on making one level of the game. Working with the group we decided to set our game in space with the player travelling between planets learning of the corruption of the company they used to work for, Eden, and later finding the tools to help end Eden for good.This level was set on the planet Lynion and would be present near the end of the game. Everyone on the planet lives undeground in tunnels and the player is tasked in exploring these tunnels and clearing them of Eden's robots to gain the trust of the people of Lynion enough to learn the location of Dr. Agnes Moroe.The level features two split paths with one being shorter but featuring more enemies and the other longer but with less. Once the player reaches the main room they have the choice to try run through quickly or take out all the enemies. The player has a few different styles of weapon at this point in the game and they can be cycled though as seen on the UI, which I designed and built.The UI features a portrait of the character at different states of damage depenant on how much health the player has, similar to Doom. It serves for a quick visual guide of when you get hit and easily communicates how close the player is to death.A video demo for demo can be seen here here.
