Fabi
Reichsoellner
A charming narrative exploration game that follows the player in their quest to find the cause of the spreading darkness from the forest. Along their journey they will be joined by an enigmatic narrator as they set out to find the key to bringing balance to the forest: the fireflies.
Hotaru was created as my third year professional project at University in a team of seven. It was longlisted for DARE Academy. ​
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Credits:
Art, Design, Production - Fabi Reichsoellner
Audio, Narrative - Harry Dub
Programming - Michael Keenan
Level design - Joas Bremer
Animation - Heléna Matheson
Character Artist - Cassia Ogilvie
Programming - Harrison Gower
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Design:
Hotaru was a student led brief, inspired by fairy tales and games such as The Unfinished Swan and Kinoko.
My main design role was creating design and art guidelines for the team to refer to as well as overseeing level design and environmental design, which I ended up creating in it's entirety.
Art:
I created various environment assets as well as textures using Substance Designer as well as implementing those in engine.
Additionally I was also responsible for screenshots and promotional game art as well as communicating with and coordinating the artists working on the character and animations.
Production:
The team used Trello and Notion to coordinate and I created overall team sprints as well as more in depth discipline specific sprints for the art and code teams.
I led art and code Scrum meetings each working day and weekly meetings with the entire team to go over the overall project schedule, progress, and sprint goals and to reaffirm the teams engagement and commitment.
For ease of documentation for each student's individual portfolio, I also created work logs and meeting logs everyone could access and fill in.
It was also my task as team lead and producer to mitigate and navigate any interdisciplinary and personal issues that arose during the project period due to the stress of lockdown and remote working.
