Introduction & Project Description:
I am excited to announce my current working project to deepen my skills during my job hunt: “Wanderlust Studios”!
In this adventure, players will impersonate a wildlife and nature photographer on a mission to trek up a procedurally generated mountainous landscape, in order to take enticing pictures of the surroundings, as well as of native animals!
As an environmentally conscious photographer, you will also have the opportunity to pick up some trash left by inconsiderate hikers, whilst grumbling under your breath - though these little acts of good faith will of course be rewarded!
This cozy-style game will be primarily conceived for PC (Win/Linux) with mouse & keyboard inputs, though controller support will be considered as well.
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Project Specs & Development Conditions:
With this announcement, the project is exiting the first design phase, and I am moving on to the development part!
The game will be implemented in Unreal Engine C++, and will be incrementally addressed feature-by-feature, following what would be an agile process in a team setting. I will do my best to keep the overall quality of the project to the best of my abilities.
In general, I want to use this project not only to showcase my software skills, but also of proper project management, meaning some industry-standard practises such as Test-Driven Development (TDD), and the maintenance of docstrings and overall documentation within the code-base for good readability!
As this is my first project without any external bounds and expectations, I will refrain from publishing timelines before knowing I can commit to them, particularly since the job search will still hold priority over this project’s development.
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Inspirations & Project Background:
While networking around during and after my latest degree, one piece of feedback I consistently received was to keep working on my portfolio in my own time. Worst-case I’d have something to talk about during interviews, and ideally this would help me get noticed by developers I could lend my skills to full-time.
Independently of this, while applying for work without the active programming component, I felt a bit of a pull to start making projects again. I would identify as a builder, and am constantly confronted with ideas I could act on, so why not bring one to life?
The last component for the project was the what. Living in the French Alps means I am surrounded at all times by majestic peaks and mountain chains, with beautiful settlements dotting the valleys in-between.
While admiring this landscape, the idea came of making something relating to trekking. Give players an environment to explore and admire - but replayability is a big subject in games, there’s few feelings worse than completing a game and thinking “I’ve seen everything” and leaving the shortcut to catch dust, or a distant memory in the Steam library.
This inspired the procedural aspect, and everything else came from there. The main purpose of the game was the aesthetic of a trekker experiencing “Wanderlust”, a wonderful German term describing the ache to see the world whilst trekking, and getting lost in its beauty. Naturally, photography lends itself to this aesthetic gameplay, and in the mountains, beyond the landscape, the unique fauna also attracts many travellers. This union of intentions explains the choice of tasking players with a photographic mission.
Finally, to give the game a bit of an environmental message, there are always reminders for trekkers to take care of the surroundings and take back packagings and items instead of leaving them out in the open, and there are always a handful of people who disregard these messages. With the feature and reward for picking up garbage along the way, I hope to encourage the preservation of our natural environment in this very modest fashion.
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Disclosures and Attributions:
The Image used as a thumbnail for this post is a stock image published by R. Tandon on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/ama-dablam-peak-in-nepal-mountains-9wg5jCEPBsw), and is free to use subject to the platform’s license agreement.
The project’s technical implementation may be assisted by Claude AI in order to inform implementation decisions, help learn state-of-the-art game development techniques, as well as to boost familiarity with the engine’s programming practises, and industry standards. No artwork/graphical or musical components to this project will be generated using GenAI tools, and all use will be fully disclosed both in code and documentation.