OXENFREE

A supernatural adventure game starring a group of friends who unwittingly open a ghostly rift. I was the lead engineer and a designer on a small team of 6. We turned this game around in 17 months from concept to launch, and have since earned numerous awards and nominations for it.

Role: Lead Engineer; Designer

Release: January 2016

Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, iOS, Android, Netflix Games

Engine: Unity

Team Size: 6-10

Website
Watch on YouTube

Contributions overview

  • Wrote all code for the game

  • Directed technical production, collaborating with all departments to build to coherent specs

  • Designed and built a real-time branching story tool that was the first of its kind

  • Collaborated on the design of all features

  • Created all VFX and screen effects

  • Animated all UI surfaces

  • Ported title to PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.

  • Handled submissions and store page logistics for all platforms

“Oxenfree might just be a big next step for adventure games. 9/10”
— GamesBeat
“The emotional adventure game you need to know about. 8.2/10”
— IGN
“Oxenfree is a compact, fresh experience that introduces lovable characters, a phenomenal soundtrack, and one of the no doubt dopest endings this year. 9/10”
— Twinfinite
“Excellence in Art - WINNER”
— Independent Games Festival 2016
“It believes in the sinister low-ebb horror of the island to worm its way into your mind without having to crutch on a jumpscare every few minutes. 9/10”
— Destructoid
“...the most important thing is a conversation system that brings to life lived-in characters actually talking to each other instead of struggling to emerge from a turn-based dialogue game. Oxenfree is the Robert Altman of videogames. 10/10”
— Quarter to Three

Contributions

  • Realtime Dialogue

    Our major innovation was a fluid dialogue system that stops for no one. The scene continues without you; you decide when to interject, interrupt, or even leave the conversation altogether. I designed and built this system by keeping track of multiple dialogue threads, priorities, and states, resolving in a way that was friendly to designers and authorable by writers.

  • "VCR" effect

    I created a dynamic, animated screen effect that resembled a VCR using HLSL. The effect had customizable and animatable jitter, vertical and horizontal offset, matched with a 1D ramp texture that defined the strength from the top to the bottom of the screen. This powered our “rewind” effect as well when the characters experience a time loop.

  • Radio Waves

    The radio is the player’s window into the supernatural dimension. I designed and built the radio interface, which takes an abstracted form of backlit, analog radio dial that floats above the character’s head. Includes fine-tuned sound design that dynamically responds to the player’s tuning behavior.

  • Supernatural Artifacts

    The “VCR” shader pulled double duty on the ghost figures, who were rendered via a second camera with a modified VCR effect applied to it. I also built the portal feature, which applied a simple dynamic mesh system, alt camera, and animated line renderers to build the impression of a cutout in space.

  • NightTools

    I built a node-based narrative and high-level scripting tool for the game from the ground up. At the time, there were few visual scripting tools for Unity, and none that allowed enforcement of the right level of abstraction from the game code. It included a localization tool as well.

Videos

We wanted to lean into real-time conversations that felt natural, and try to give the player room to interject or take some other time-sensitive action as they see fit. I built the frameworks for this system and the tools that writers and designers used to author the content and interruption rules.