Sankofa Seasons
A singleplayer exploration game based around gathering stories.
A showcase of the console buttons.
A showcase of the rolling scroll.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
Sankofa Seasons is an ongoing project that I am no longer directly affiliated with. It is still quite early in development, so no public build is currently available for use.
What is Sankofa Seasons?
Sankofa Seasons is an ongoing project at DePaul University by the DePaul Original Game Studio. It is a non-linear exploration game where you find pots throughout the game world and bring them to a forge to hear interviews with real people about their life stories.
What role(s) did I serve on the project?
I worked on Sankofa Seasons as a UI designer and 3D artist over a ten-week period. This project is being created in Unreal Engine 5, and is still in development.
The task I had during this project was that of improving the game’s UI. I created the current rendition of the interface that the player uses to select and play the individual parts of the game’s interviews. This interface is composed of actual in-game objects rather than a GUI.
How the story interface works
When a pot is placed in the forge, the rolled-up scroll to the side of it will unfurl, the text displaying the necessary info (as well as the play/pause buttons for the audio segments) about the currently-selected story piece.
The number of visible chunks on the console that resembles a fractured pot are representative of how many segments the story has, while also being buttons that are used to select segments of the story.
Black buttons are locked segments, the orange button is the segment that is currently selected, and yellow buttons are unlocked segments. Green buttons are simply what the cursor is currently highlighting. Each unlocked button has a glowing icon that changes to match the corresponding part of the story.
The original state of this UI was a basic pair of floating widgets, and now they have been replaced by animated 3D objects that dynamically update as parts of stories are unlocked or selected. The text font and color is different in the current state of the project, but I cannot yet provide an image of it in its current state.
