Vesper is a narrative game platform being developed by a small remote-distributed startup company (a team of 12!)

We collaborate with experienced authors, Dungeon Masters, comedians and creators to bring their fantasy stories and scripts into short-form interactive game worlds.

To translate the scripts into playable games; we have built our own custom game syntax language that converts the human-written stories into game data, which is then parsed at runtime to construct the narratives dynamically.

I am a Lead Game Developer on the project from the very start; responsible for:

• Architecting & programming the project's foundation & events system.

• Rapid-prototyping various features based on game design decisions.

• Developing core game systems & mechanics; characters, input, camera, UI, audio, VFX, etc

• Implemented runtime game data loading, with back-end engineer.

• Designed & integrated human-focused unique dialogue syntax for writers.

• Implemented requested custom tools for artists & audio designer.

• Programmed custom lighting & optimized modular shaders.

• Internal mentoring for team members to improve their skills.

• With leadership team, defined company values & goals.

The project is currently built using Unity 6 with Universal Render Pipeline (Forward+).

The project is aimed to have first release in 2025 with the first 4 stories, and then more stories added to it in the future!

Main Collaborators

Cat Burton - Co-Founder & CTO

Aurelien Baarsch - Art Director

Jasper Stocker - Lead Procedural Generation Developer

Liam O'Donnell-Carey - Senior Developer

Hugo Oringe - UI & UX Designer Danny Wood - Senior Backend Developer

Lauren Clair - Technical Artist

Dan Batherwick - Sound Designer