End of the Line
Creative Director - Art Director - Surfacing
What was the project?
End of the Line was my bachelors project of which I took the roles of creative director, art director and texture artist. End of the Line isn't exactly a game but a visual narrative in which myself and 8 others worked together to produce. The story is set in 1983 London, after the aftermath of and apocalypse and you play as a survivor trying to find a safe haven, passing through and underground station. End of the Line was built in Unreal Engine 5.3.2.
Why did I make this my Bachelors project?
This project started out as words on paper in form of a game design document I wrote for another class during the start of 2025. I loved the setting and world building I wrote and discovered I tried to convince others to work on it with me. One thing let to another and we had an amazing group with an incredible skillset involved in the project. However, before starting the project I was served with a personal choice I had to make and it was the identity of the project. The document previosuly wrote served as a full fledge scope game with a team with full time hours over possibly years, so as the creative director I had to make a choice.
I made the choice by wanting to achieve one goal greatly, rather than two goals mediocre. This meant that I could direct a game with no art and pure mechanics, making it fun and enjoyable but artistically dull or I could make a visual narrative with a cohesive art style but mechanically boring. Due to the natural artist in me, I chose the latter and formed a group around this idea we could explore a visual narrative and use all of our skills to create a believable world. This also led me to have the opportunity to create something the University has never seen before as I wanted the project to stand out and show people what we could do as students.
My Roles Within The Project
Being the creative director and the only texture artist wasn't easy. I naturally fell into the creative role as I am the one who created the setting and theme and conceptual lore of the project but during this time I really became interested in the surfacing process for games and focussed on that for my intellectual development. However, what took me by surprise was I fell naturally into the art director due to my other 2 roles and had the goal to make a team of 9 people work together cohesively.
I wrote an art bible to help with this, which worked to a degree and what helped is that all of us tried our absolute hardest to make this work. We had a total of 14 weeks to hand the project in on around 15 hours a week, excluding group and supervisory meetings. Coming into this I knew Substance Painter well enough to quickly try and produce textures and had a little experience directing as it wasn't my first project leading a group. Overall I found this project difficult to work on and it really pushed me to the limits with many late nights and long days, but left me with priceless experience which has served me well.
The Challenges and Successes
Safe to say, there were lots of challenges within the project but also a lot of success. I could name tons of challenges but really the biggest came from trying to work within the time frame and balancing the 3 roles. Towards the texturing role, Substance Painter was challenging but due to my previous experience I learnt very quickly and solved most of which came through with ease. However the same cannot be said about balancing those roles within a short amount of time. Trying to process feedback, communicating design decisions to 8 others on top of trying to make my ideas concise, was beyond difficult. I managed to work around this by seeing this project a some sort of "brotherhood" meaning I never saw myself more than anyone else and we were in this together, projecting a horizontal management structure. Since we had a team of modellers, tech artist, level design etc. this was feasible and worked well. We were all friends and due to this we had each others back's and I couldn't of done it without the support of the team.
The biggest success came from the final result. We spent everything we had trying to make the style cohesive and we achieved it. We manage to organise playtesting and showcase events which had many people watch and enjoy. Seeing the smiles from everyone was the biggest enjoyment of them all.
