A Raccoon’s Tale

A Raccoon’s Tale (game and game page in German) is a small, atmospheric quest game about a racoon and a cat exploring a futuristic city ruled by penguins and filled with intrigue.

For a faster in-game look, see this playthrough.

My work: Tech Lead, Quest Design, Narrative, Writing, Lighting.
Duration: October 2021 – today, on average ca. 3h/week
University Project, done by a team of 4-9. Unreal Engine 4/5.

Tech Lead

Over the course of the project, I became the main developer responsible for technical matters. This included direction and execution of systems and mechanics implementation as well as being build and git master and contact for help with any scripting issues.

Examples of my work:

  • implementing level-transition fading and state carry-over
  • advising one of my colleagues on implementing the Cat AI system and co-authoring it
  • exploring and evaluating new (for us) technology, like Lumen, DiscordRPC, CommonUI or the transition to UE5.0; formulating small tutorials for the team
Example of one such small “tutorial”.
  • producing all major builds since I joined

This role taught me more about Unreal Engine 5 and team dynamics than any other project: I had to learn about a lot of engine topics that I had never touched before, and moreover, understand how to act in a directing position without sliding into micromanaging.

Quest Design

My main professional goal in contributing to the development of A Raccoon’s Tale was to improve my quest design skills. We designed the game’s format as a relatively simple adventure, with several levels each containing one quest to play through and only a few detours. Here follows a highlight from my work.

One of Level 1’s goals was to give the story a major propeller and bonding moment. Therefore, the quest team (me and a colleague) designed a place with a crime scene where an important ally of the newly found cat friend is found dead. With this premise, we crafted the remaining quest plot:

General pacing graph of the quest in level 1 (in German).

The pacing was based on a division into two sections: the yet fine but cracking good world of the protagonist (knowing nothing of any intrigues), his companion (not knowing her agent is dead), and the world (not yet stormy, not yet a dark back alley).

First impression of the crime scene.
Decision point.

A lot of my work was to find ways to translate this design into code and level content. This could mean devising a weather system, a lighting scheme, cat behavior, environmental art, subsequent lines of dialogue, and so on.

Lighting

Below you can find some of the lighting work I did for A Raccoon’s Tale in order to enhance its dramatic and atmospheric qualities.

This work included not only setting local light sources, but also creating blueprints for flickering lights, finetuning global moonlight, fog and processing, and optimising lighting ranges without compromising the artistic intent.

Key Learnings

Never have I felt the value and labor in polishing and learning as in this project. While the basic structure was relatively easy, we had to overcome a lot of design and technical challenges until we got to a point where we deemed the level “finished”, which was our goal.

The focus on one level, one quest, and one major NPC allowed me to see a lot of intricacies in quest design that I could not see in Ocularis: the importance of camera framing in seamless scenes, the reduction of noise in important moments, and how written text directly influenced the player’s orientation.

Being the main developer dealing with technical issues led to various moments where I was the only person able to solve certain problems. Navigating this tension to this day influences the work ethic I set for myself.