Never Alone: Foxtales

Never Alone is a puzzle-platforming adventure game based on a traditional Iñupiaq tale. It was made in close partnership with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, and featured cultural insight videos containing stories directly from the community. Foxtales was a DLC expansion featuring a new story, more cultural insight videos, as well as improvements to the base game.

This was the first professional project I was a part of after graduating DigiPen, and I’ll never forget the feeling I had the first time I made a build and pushed it to a PS4 dev kit.

When I joined the project, it was already well underway, but one of the first things I remember working on was called the “milepost system.” It was a dev tool meant to improve bug reporting and performance logging. It allowed users to place mileposts throughout the level, and give them relevant names. Then, at runtime, milepost logging could be enabled through the in-game console, which would display information about the nearest milepost, and the player’s orientation relative to it. It was simple, but it was effective for helping repro bugs and track down level-specific performance issues.

Although the audio system was largely already in place when I started, our sound designers (the folks at Impossible Acoustic) wanted a bit more control for the water in Foxtales. It was really cool working so closely with them and fulfilling the requests they had. Jamie even bought me my first Arnold Palmer at the coffee shop downstairs 😋.