The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is a cinematic branching narrative game with third person exploration elements. It is the 2nd instalment of The Dark Pictures Anthology, and was released in October of 2020.

I was brought onto Little Hope halfway through development, and quickly entrusted with a handful of levels to push forward in terms of quality, cinematic content, and gameplay. I quickly advanced my understanding of not only Unreal Engine's sequence and level building tools, but also Supermassive Game's proprietary branching narrative tools and visual scripting language. My skills and confidence grew day by day, and in no time I was able to keep up with peers on my team.

Eventually as individual levels approached Master quality, designers were given more holistic, game-wide tasks. I myself was part of a strike-team looking at the quality of the death and "jump-scare" cinematics in Little Hope, pillars of the franchise that senior stakeholders were eager to perfect. I worked with the Game Director, and a multidiscipline team of artists and animators to refine these moments as much as possible, responding to feedback with rapid iteration and independent creativity.

During the end of my time on Little Hope, I was assigned one of the penultimate scenes in the game, where-in various diverging narrative branches join back into one of many endings. Due to production decisions, this level had been neglected during previous development phases, and thus needed a lot of rapid work to bring it up to quality. Also, due to narrative changes made during this period, the available assets and cinematic content needed to be updated, with no capacity to record new dialogue or animation data.

My time working on this level was extremely challenging, but extremely rewarding. I learned how to make the most of a difficult situation, using what resources and skills I had to breathe new context into the scene. Reframing cameras, repurposing dialogue, reusing and warping animation data. I used every tool at my disposal to not only bring all possible variants of the level up to quality, but adapt to the new realities of the narrative and Game Director's intents.