Order of the Hollow Star is a surreal, emotionally reactive narrative game built in Unreal Engine. The player navigates a branching storyline shaped by trust, loyalty, and perception: not through binary choices, but through how they move, interact, and spend time with others. The game centers on a sentient clocktower hub and uses a dynamic emotional system to alter narrative paths, puzzle access, and NPC relationships.

I independently designed and developed the entire game from scratch, buidling all core systems, emotional AI logic, and branching narrative structure using Blueprint Scripting and C++. All environment and character assets were sourced from Fab.com.

In a world where emotion defines consequence, players must earn trust, navigate shifting alliances, and survive surreal trials. Order of the Hollow Star reimagines narrative gameplay through emotional AI, spatial memory, and reactive relationships.

Built a lightweight emotional AI module using Blueprints/C++, tracking trust, attention, proximity, gaze, and dialogue interaction/tone.

Designed for custom nuance: this system isn’t off-the-shelf LLM; it’s tailor-made to enforce design constraints and player emotional nuance.

In progress: prototyping talk-to-text pipeline, integrating dialogue generation tools to support reactive NPC speech.

Emotional System:
NPCs evaluate the player’s loyalty, trustworthiness, and intent through subtle gameplay cues: movement patterns, dialogue choices, time spent with them, and more.

Adaptive Relationships:
Player actions outside of conversations shape NPC reactions. NPCs remember avoidance, betrayal, and favoritism.

Spatial Narrative Hub:
The game is centered around the Clocktower Hub, a surreal mechanical environment where the player returns between trials.

Trial-Based Progression:
Each trial door opens only when specific emotional thresholds are met. Some truths remain locked unless the player earns NPC’s trust and loyalty.

Consequences and Failure:
Emotion isn’t just flavor in this game, it defines survival. One trial features a puzzle where looking away at the wrong moment leads to sudden death.

Emotional AI System:
Built a custom system to monitor player behavior including timing, movement, and dialogue tone; and dynamically update emotional stats like trust and loyalty, which drive NPC reactions and world logic.

Narrative Design:
Designed a branching narrative where each NPC tracks emotional nuance, unlocking or blocking storylines based on how the player engages. NPCs evolve over time, remembering avoidance, betrayal, and preference.

Technical Implementation:
Used Unreal Engine’s Blueprint system to structure emotion-driven state machines, dialogue trees, and relationship gates. Integrated C++ for backend optimization of continuous emotion tracking.

Spatial Narrative Design:
Developed the surreal Clocktower Hub, a central environment that shifts subtly depending on emotional alignment. Trial doors open only when emotional thresholds are met, encouraging players to build relationships over brute-force progress.

Consequence-Based Progression:
Designed “emotion-gated” puzzles, for example, one trial punishes the player for breaking eye contact with an NPC, ending the game abruptly. Emotion in this game defines survival, not just flavor.

Order of the Hollow Star is currently in active development, with the emotion system and branching structure undergoing playtesting. The project demonstrates my ability to merge technical systems with narrative depth using emotion not as a visual layer, but as a core gameplay mechanic that defines consequence, unlocks, and player identity. This project was an opportunity to experiment with subtle emotional input as a gameplay driver, using non-verbal cues and spatial behaviour as data for branching narrative.