In this game, you follow Wiz the wizard who is about to embark on a Big Trip. (I'm wonderful at naming things if you couldn't tell.) You're joined briefly by your friend Arda who wishes to see you out, however the village is emptier than usual. Come to find out, the village is surrounded by monsters and a dragon has even infiltrated the nearby mines. Wiz must go out and deal with it themself, shooting fireballs to damage enemies and picking up health and magic restoring potions Potion Seller Kid dropped in the woods. There's also actual audible dialogue in the game, all of which I voiced myself.
This being my first big project, there were a lot of ups and downs. I got to play with Unreal Engine's landscape mode for the first time and experimented with implementing dialogue, a skill I would go on to tweak and improve in many of my larger projects going forward. The story-driven aspect of my game (as well as the voicing of the dialogue) really helped distinguish me from my peers, and this project was one of the student projects actually showcased at an open house for Douglas College's VR Lab in May of 2024. My inexperience combined with the time constraints of a final project definitely lead to a few mistakes that took a toll on the actual playability of the game, (namely that the enemies were extraordinarily hard to kill and had a tendency to still hit you while they were dying) but I admit that so freely because those mistakes were major learning experiences for me that have stuck in my mind for every project since. They're elements that I have put work into understanding where exactly I went wrong and how I could improve, and my later work really showcases this. Someday I would really like to go back and fix aspects of this game, but for now it serves as a good example of my early skills and lessons learned.