A cozy 3D visual novel.
Year:
2025
Timeframe:
5 Months
Tools:
Unreal Engine, Blender
Category:
3D Visual Novel
Synopsis
Runaway is a cozy, 3D, third-person interactive visual novel with a focus on queer narratives, comforting experiences, and a soft and vibrant visual style.
Explore a rundown farm after a mighty storm and play as Dart, a border collie farmer who is tasked with repairing the farm, searching for missing farm residents, and learning their stories.
My Role
Worked as a programmer in core team of 6. It was my role to implement features, UI, mechanics, to fix bugs and to step in if any 3D models or shaders were required.
The features I programmed were the inventory and item system that could be used to fix parts of the farm, an interaction system, the NPC's AI behavior, the implementation of the updated UI aesthetics, shaders for the grass, a particle system for the wind, as well as ensuring the dialogue system functioned as it was meant to.
The Vertical Slice
The Vertical slice covers the first chapter of the Runaway story. It begins with a small cutscene of the main character: Dart, driving away from home while on call with his mother in the middle of a storm. Dart explains how he's just bought the land to the farm the game takes place in. The game then starts the next day where you find that some of the residents of the farm: Alison and Eva have lost track of their daughter, Koya. You help them to find their daughter and reunite them while discovering deeper connections and meanings behind each of their actions. The vertical slice ends with you helping to rebuild the sheep couple's home that was damaged by the storm.
Click image to explore
The items and inventory work together to create a system that can dynamically add and remove items from the widget. Each item is a child of a parent BP_Item class, within the children you can set the name, quantity, mesh, and item thumbnail. This information is then read by the inventory component on the player which sends the information to the widget to add the thumbnail to the widget slot. depending on your current inventory it will either create a new slot, or if you already have an item of the same type, it will add to a counter that displays how many of that item you have. Items can then be removed from the inventory by clicking on them, causing the item to drop onto the ground. However in Runaway we decided that the player didn't need to drop items as it would only confuse the player.