BREWESS Demo
Fairer Games | Unreal Engine 5 | 1 Month
Brewess is a narrative adventure game about crafting ales and building friendships in Early Modern East Anglia.
I joined the lovely team at Fairer Games to produce a demo to be shown at the 2023 London Games Festival.
🔗 Steam Page | Fairer Games' Website | Link Tree 🔗
⚠️ This project was completed under an NDA and therefore I may not be able to discuss some elements in full detail.
Key Responsibilities
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Liaising with studio founder to outline requirements, expectations and deliverables.
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Adding all existing art, dialogue and UI into engine; outlining gaps and proposing timely additions.
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Communicating with existing members of the team to ensure their work is implemented accurately.
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Interpreting client's concepts to create engaging gameplay.
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Obtaining feedback and iterating on implementations during a tight development window.
Notable Work
Dialogue System
During early testing I played around with a classic graph-based approach to implementing dialogue, written in pure C++ with a wrapper for UE5's audio system. The eventual goal was to expose this in UE5 blueprints and allow events to be dispatched to trigger state changes for other systems.
Unfortunately the production timeline was way too tight to implement such a system and the code oriented implementation method would hinder later iterations of demo development for the team after my contract had expired. With this in mind, I opted to utilise an existing solution that could allow the team to implement dialogue with a visual editor instead by forking a public dialogue system and implementing it into the demo.
Thanks to this visual implementation system I was able to not only quickly iterate over all dialogue lines but also include other members of the team too! This social media post showcases some of the early development tests.
Brewing Gameplay
The core gameplay of Brewess relies on many smaller tasks to create a "spinning plate" design, rather than one large in-depth mechanic. Players begin by using a drag and drop system to prepare their station, lighting a fire and fetching water. Afterwards they are tasked with balancing the heat of a hearth via two bellows which need to be pressed in a pattern that reflect what ingredient was added, which will allow them to stir in an ingredient for a select number of times in a designated direction.
Because these interactions are individually quite small, there was a desire to make player input feel impactful.
Audio and visual cues were beneficial but only helped once an input had already been made, we wanted something physical that immersed the player in the actions being performed. To that end, many of the input actions became exaggerated - the mouse needed larger sweeping arcs to stir the ale while keypresses for the bellows needed higher actuation on controller (and supported keyboards).
Analysis & Thoughts
This contract has a special place in my heart - the turnaround time was possibly the harshest I've experienced in freelance and yet every single member of the team at Fairer Games was, without a doubt, some of the nicest people I have had the pleasure to work beside. In an industry that feeds on passion, working in a small team who bring such enthusiasm to every conversation is a true joy and reminded me why we all do what we do.
Reception at the 2023 London Games Fest was reportedly good, with the game appearing on steam's LGF page.
A personal highlight for me was seeing Josh Sawyer, a developer I greatly admire, post the game on Twitter.