Athena Worlds – Designer, Writer & Programmer: Unannounced UE5 Project (2025-2026)

Over a 12 month period, I initially worked as programmer and then a designer and writer on an unannounced UE5 Project.

My work on this project, in both capacities, was to create the foundations for the game’s development throughout a multi-year cycle for a base game release, supported by future regular expansion releases.

Working in Unreal Engine 5.5, the project was envisioned as a stealth first, immersive sim game with a horror theming set within a small scale open world. This world and the systems within it would be expanded with each expansion.

As part of the programming team, I:

• Codified the codebase architecture
• Prototyped initial systems the player would encounter within their first play sessions
• Implemented features that encompassed UI, AI and Gameplay disciplines
• Generated project agnostic solutions to common issues utilising plugins and function libraries that could be easily translated to future projects

I moved disciplines to become a full time designer at the end of 2025 as we did not have a dedicated designer. This change in role drastically changed my main tasks and goals, requiring me to think about the full game and it’s intended experiences instead of working in an agile style task allocation pattern.

As the project’s designer, I:

• Established the framework for the full project, approaching mechanics, systems and content design with a systemic approach to gameplay interactions
• Meticulously detailed the game’s theming and direction, considering the narratives and gameplay interactions as part of a whole to
• Created truly unique new approaches to common existing gameplay design problems that were bespoke to the project’s goals, enhancing the overall quality of addressing these design problem
• Designed levels of varying scales in an informed manner to achieve high quality and interesting locations and curated experiences for players
• Created a synergistic and tightly knit set of systems that is able to work under a vast range of scenarios and actor types, providing deeply meaningful reasons for players to interact with all of the content put into the game
• Devised a method of storytelling that utilised what makes games a unique vehicle for interesting narratives beyond simply providing an interactive book, movie or TV show

In conjunction with my design work, I was also the writer for the project. Synergising my design work to my narrative work, I:

• Devised a frame story narrative approach to delivering a flexible amount of curated experiences to the player in a similar manner to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Defined a unique system to quest design that would adapt parts, or potentially all, of a quest’s steps, locations or conditions based on the past (in)actions of the player
• Outlined a 5 year plan for the project and it’s future expansion releases, creating an established narrative for the full length of content support to avoid poor and inconsistent narrative, reactionary planning
• Delivered a detailed worldbuilding framework, establishing a long history prior to the game’s events and how events would take place during gameplay

All aspects of my work on this project for reference by the full team was created using Obsidian and then the information was centralised on a company Confluence space. Across my tenure on the project, I wrote up over 100 files and generated 100k+ words, documenting development processes and outlining the planned direction and content of the project.

As this project was unannounced and in the early development stages, materials for this project are not readily available on this website. Materials can be provided directly as evidence to those with a vested need for them, if required.