Child of Lothian

Steam Game

Game: Child of Lothian is about an orphan girl who lives in the early 1700s while the witch hunts were still active.

Genre: Stealth, Immersive Sim, Action-Adventure, Historical.

Platform: Steam (PC)

Engine: Made in Unreal. with art made in Maya and programming done with C++ in Visual Studios.

Development Time: Made within 1 school year with some weeks not spent on the project, spending around 35 weeks on the project in total.

Team Members: 10 Designers - 5 Programmers -

9 Visual Artists - 22 Outsourcers.

Origin: At the start of the school year, each student was asked to give their top 3 game ideas they wanted to work on from a collection of game concepts. Child of Lothian was meant to be about an orphan in the 1700s, taking place in Edinburgh.

My Responsibilities:

Designing the Pickpocketing System.
Re-designing / optimizing the falling lantern.
UI design and functionality.
Create a QA document and a test plan.
Prototype the progression preventer.
Door opening functionality.

The falling light would on hit attract the AI's attention so that the player would be able to sneak past them. This was however scrapped because there was an object with essentially the same function, the bell.

During early development, doors would open with a button or pressure plate. However, because of the year this is taking place, we limited the door opening with levers. Either way, I worked on the door opening up in a fluent motion, which is still in the game.

Steam Page

When aiming with the sling, the UI will highlight red when hovering over an object or NPC it can interact with. This was added to make it clearer for the players what they could use the sling on.

For the current functionality of the main menu, I was put in charge of building and setting up the UI. The functionality was later improved by programmers.

The biggest mechanic I prototyped with someone else was pickpocketing. This is the main mechanic of the game, and it went through the most changes as well. In this prototype, you only had to hold the button while staying within range of the target.

For the second prototype of pickpocketing, I took inspiration from Kingdom Come Deliverance's pickpocketing system, where the player has to move towards the item they want to steal and then return to a finish icon before the target notices.

I took the assets and the minigame Mind Mine from Danganrompa V3 as inspiration for this prototype because I thought it would be an interesting minigame for it that would represent looking around in someone's pocket until you find the item you were looking for and maybe find something you weren't expecting.