Hi, I'm Brandon — founder of **The Aberrant Raven**, a small indie studio building **Contentment**, a six-chapter narrative adventure in **Unreal Engine 5.7**, and I'm looking to bring on a few collaborators.
The game: Two worlds, mechanically coupled.
The Wake World: is a grounded near-future medical drama —A nurse practitioner at a medical research facility, as a new drug called Contentment rapidly moves through society. Social deduction encounters. All choices influence the game
The Dream world:
A full turn-based JRPG layer — a six-character party, ATP-gauge combat, skill trees, — and what happens in one world bleeds into the other. Story-first, systems-heavy, tonally somewhere between quiet realism and strange fantasy.
All in-engine, current build, one level of many — clockwise from top left: sunset over the water; one of the level's larger structures; top-down of the full level (part dressed, part blockout — honest current state); the live contextual interaction system, where objects carry multiple verbs and optional tasks already have dialogue consequences when skipped.*
Where it actually stands:
- Playable-in-editor with live quest/task and interaction systems — see above
- Rebuilt third-person camera architecture, custom input contexts
- Git source control on an 855-file baseline
- Maintained lore bible + technical bible, with a formal scoped-handoff process — every task is documented, bounded, and verifiable
- Full combat system designed and entering implementation currently
- Environment dressing uses a professional marketplace asset pipeline (Fab / KitBash3D kits, project-licensed) with custom work layered on — so as a collaborator you're building with a real asset library from day one, not gray boxes. Assets ship with the project files; you don't need to own any licenses yourself.
- On a two-year plan targeting a Steam Next Fest demo — and the timeline is calibrated so **no collaborator's hours are load-bearing**. You accelerate the project; you never carry it.
Roles I'm looking for:
- 3D Artist (environment/props/clothes) — building out two very different worlds: near-future urban/clinical spaces and fantasy biomes
- Character Artist / Animator / Rigger — game-ready characters and combat animation into UE5
- Programmer (Blueprint and/or C++) — combat implementation, data-driven quest/task tooling, editor utilities
- Level Designer — blockout-to-polish on story-driven spaces across both worlds, working with the existing asset library and/or custom builds
- Narrative Scripter (Writer + Blueprint) — a hybrid role for someone who can both write and implement: ambient NPC dialogue, barks, and side-conversation systems, built in-engine. The world's story and canon are authored and locked, so this is writing *within* an established universe in close collaboration with me — great fit if you enjoy bringing a world to life rather than inventing one from scratch.
- Concept Artist — visual development for dream-world creatures, characters, and environments
- VFX (Niagara) — combat and dream-world effects
(Music and audio are covered in-house. Voice acting will come later in production — not casting yet.)
Terms: This is a passion/hobby collaboration at present — full credit, scoped tasks rather than vague open-ended asks, and terms discussed openly and honestly before you commit an hour. I run this project with documentation and structure because I want collaborators' time respected.
Interested? Reply here with the role you're interested in and a portfolio link, or add me on Discord: **theaberrantraven** Happy to show you the build and the docs before you decide anything.