3D Exploration Sim
PC, Developed January-May 2021
A calm, narrative-focused mail-delivering experience.
Overview
Polaris Postal service is a 3D, exploration & narrative-based walking sim. The player fills the role of a temp letter carrier who has been assigned to a new route in a magical forest, where the sun never shines. The Lunar Festival is approaching, and there’s plenty of work to be done to prepare; the player must use their Celestial Navigation via magic telescope to ensure that all the letters in the Village reach their intended destination.
Narrative
My primary role on the team was as one of two Narrative Designers. The narrative team was introduced to the project halfway into development, as the project was switching engines from Unity to Unreal. Much of the narrative was unwritten at the start, and the purpose/direction of the narrative remained loose until we buckled down. We started with a series of side-quests, which was streamlined into a “campaign” of sorts when our needs changed, preventing us from scrapping weeks of work.
Feature-Leading
The team behind Polaris suffered from major communication issues early on, which called for a restructuring of our leadership. One such change was the development of Feature Teams, each of which had a lead who was responsible for communicating with other Feature Leads, as well as ensuring that the feature met the overall vision for the game. I volunteered as the Quest Implementation and Speech System Feature Lead; during which I oversaw the functionality of our dialogue system and its peripheral impacts, ensuring that it would be compatible with our Constellation system, and that other members of the team had all the tools needed to create the narrative we wanted to tell.
Thomas Rebeck 