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 four when we started development, which included me, founders Sean Krankel and Adam Hines, and lead artist Heather Gross. We turned this game around in 17 months from concept to launch, and have since earned numerous awards and nominations for it.
OXENFREE
Role: Lead Engineer; Designer
Release: January 2016
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, iOS, Android, Netflix Games
Engine: Unity
Team Size: 4-10
Contributions overview
Wrote all code for the game
Directed technical production, collaborating with all departments to build to spec on a tight timeline
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
Built an AWS-powered social feature that shared certain choices with friends and the community
Scripted over 50% of story content and level design
Ported title to PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.
Handled submissions and store page logistics for all platforms
“Excellence in Art - WINNER”
“Oxenfree might just be a big next step for adventure games. 9/10”
“...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”
“The emotional adventure game you need to know about. 8.2/10”
“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”
“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”
Work with me →
Contribution Highlights
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![The main characters of OXENFREE around a campfire on a beach. The player’s dialogue options are “Give him a break,” “Ask me something instead,” or “Ooh, good one.”]()
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 our writer, Adam Hines.
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![Alex turning a tape player wheel while in a time loop. The screen appears to be glitching, looking a bit like a paused VCR.]()
"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.
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![Alex and Jonas next to a statue with the radio UI open.]()
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, which I collaborated with composer and sound designer Andrew Rohrmann (aka ‘scntfc’) to create.
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![Alex underneath a large portal, while a possessed Clarissa talks to her. The ghost behind Clarissa is rendered with a modified VCR shader.]()
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. These brought lead artist Heather Gross’ concepts to life as dynamic and responsive animated effects.
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![A screenshot of NightScript, a graph-based narrative writing and scripting tool.]()
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.
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![Alex sees a reflection of herself that is beginning to talk to her. The alternate Alex has choices above her head that don’t look quite right.]()
Parallel Universes
Players would sometimes encounter alternate versions of Alex, the main character. The choices this alternate Alex makes is an actual choice that another player on your friend list made in their playthrough. This and the end-of-game player statistics were AWS-powered features that used a DynamoDB database to track and retrieve players’ choices.
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.
