Overview
Description: Charon’s Companion is a 3D adventure platformer where you play as Nyx, a cat navigating the underworld to save your late owner, Chrys. After her soul shatters in the wake of a tragic accident, Charon, the ferryman of the afterlife, asks for your help in piecing it back together.
Jump, climb, and solve puzzles across a mysterious spirit realm, uncovering lost memories and facing echoes of Chrys’s past. Only by restoring her soul can you help her find peace and finally move on.
Project Length: January 2025 – May 2025
My Contribution
For this project I was our Assistant Producer, Narrative Lead, and Level Designer. Other responsibilities included:
- Assisting with merge errors
- Creating mod tools
- Integrating art assets into levels
- Creating particle effects
As Assistant Producer, I took on the responsibility of production whenever our producer was not available. I would assign tasks, discuss important topics, and make creative decisions with the team. I would then relay all this to the primary producer.
As Narrative Lead, I was responsible for constructing the core overarching narrative of the game. I built off the original pitch to add depth to the characters and the world around them. I also wrote all the dialogue in the game and assisted with writing the letters across the three levels. We knew we wanted the game to have roots in Green mythology, which led to us integrating some Greek iconography and Charon as a character. This was a jumping off point for both our aesthetics and our narrative.
As Level Designer, I followed the design process from conceptualization to design and finally development. I worked with our producer and second level designer to create a outline of what we wanted our levels to be.
Within each level, we wanted individual sections that would introduce mechanics, utilize them, then integrate them with our other puzzle elements. This is our first sketch of our second level, the shore. we broke the shore up into individual sections that each introduced a new mechanic or idea.
As development continued, I took on the responsibility of building our level greyboxes. One element we wanted to capture early was a sense of scale, due to the small size of our protagonist.
Josh Chen 