Herald
Description
Herald is an interactive period drama set during the 19th century. Players take on the role of Devan Rensburg, a steward on the HLV Herald, navigating the complex social hierarchies and colonial injustices of the Age of Sail. The game seamlessly blends 3D ship exploration with high-fidelity 2D animated portraits using Live2D.
The "Generalist" Internship
During my internship at Wispfire, I operated as both a Programmer and Game Designer. Working in a small, focused team required me to be highly versatile, moving between high-level system architecture and granular gameplay polish. This role was pivotal in teaching me how to integrate design requests while working in a system of code that had to remaind maintainable.
Key Features & Architecture
Because the team was small, I was responsible for implementing several custom solutions from the ground up:
- Dynamic Animation & Rigging: I developed a custom rope rigging system to allow for dynamic, procedural animation of the ship’s rigging.
- Camera & Interaction Systems: I designed and implemented the camera behavior and a custom cursor/hover system, ensuring the fixed camera locations did not intersect with environment and allowed navigation.
- Animation State Machines: I built complex animation controllers that synchronized character movements and expressions with player inputs and branching dialogue triggers.
Responsibilities
- Gameplay Programming: Developed generalist systems including interaction logic, UI feedback, and environment-specific physics (ropes/rigging).
- Game Design: Participated in the design process for narrative interactions, ensuring technical systems supported the game’s heavy emphasis on character development.
- Systems Integration: Helped integrate a dialogue system and extend upon the existing systems to support our desired features.
