Joshua Best

You play as a lost traveller with an undiscovered talent for violence, stumbling upon a grizzled sellsword who tasks you with ridding the land of its pesky Duck Deer population. However, this odd job quickly escalates when the sellsword offers you his blade—on the condition that you slay Derek the Demon Gargoyle. Armed with snappy combat skills and platforming agility, you traverse a stylized world filled with enemies and challenges, making your way to Derek’s eerie castle for an epic showdown to prove whether you really have what it takes to slay Derek.

Desolation of Derek is a first-person action-adventure game created in collaboration with Ed Forrest. Combining my work in programming and level design with Ed’s animation expertise, we brought this game to life. My goal for this project was to explore various techniques and theories to achieve a constant state of immersion through level design and programming in Unreal Engine 5—without sacrificing player enjoyment.