A Fateful (K)night

Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Genre: Third-person narrative adventure
Role: Project Lead, Level Design, Story Design
Itch.io: https://revtilt.itch.io/a-fateful-knight
Overview

A Fateful (K)night is a narrative experience where the player plays as an banished knight, caught in the assassination night of the King and trying to save his captured sister. Players must decide who to trust along the way and fight their way through.

The game features multiple endings based on player's choices and aims to immerse players into the intense, mysterious story and all the game design elements serves to emphasize this narrative experience.
Level Design, Story Frame Design, UI Design, Encounter Design
My Contribution
  • Led a small team of 4 designers to create a 15 minutes of narrative gameplay experience
  • Designed and built 7 distinctive levels with minimalist art style, set dressed with lighting
  • Refined branching story choices and integrated story frame into different levels
  • Designed dice-based combat encounters in the game
Features
Run through immersive levels to uncover the truth
Make meaningful choices that affect the story
Fight through
combat encounters with limited resources
Immersive Levels
When it comes to level design, the team faces a big challenge: I was the only level designer and we want multiple levels with a unique, silhouette based art style within our time constraint.
  • To achieve my goal, I first decided to limit player’s camera to a fixed angle so that not only I can more easily bring players attention to the main scene, but also save time not having to build what's behind the player.
  • Next, I made use of bold silhouettes for background and white shapes to build levels upon. This approach creates an simple, minimalist look to the game. By using limited amount of colors, it’s also easier to guide players towards their objectives.
castle view: 
far into darkness & authority
courtyard: 
princess's loneliness & helplessness
  • Last, I wanted to make levels feel like a fairy tale and a sense of mystery into the night, so I made levels mostly in dark spaces, using negative spaces in the background, lights & shadows defining the player flow path. This solution emphasizes the theme of the game, while at the same time immerse player in the story.
running across bridge: 
sun rising, emergency
throne room: 
commanding presence
Story Choice
Branching Story Paths: I want players’ choices to carry real weight, letting them to face lasting consequences of their decisions. Throughout the story, players encounter Ethan, a royal knight and the protagonist’s former best friend, and Celine, the kingdom’s princess and the protagonist’s past lover.
The player’s decisions: whether to kill or spare these characters, directly shape the story’s outcome. Therefore the design goal was to build a branching narrative framework with four distinct endings, each offering a unique and meaningful resolution.
Story Branching paths
in-game Story Choice screens
Combat Encounters
Battle Through Story: A Fateful (K)night also features combat encounters integrated throughout the narrative. As players progress, they must make strategic decisions with limited resources, reinforcing the story’s tension.

Enemy difficulty also gradually increases, reflecting the protagonist’s escalating struggle towards the end.
Dice-based Combat: To reflect the protagonist’s misfortune as a banished knight, combat is built around dice rolls. Players have a fixed pool of 10 dice for the entire game and must choose how many to spend to meet encounter requirements. Failure results in a game over, turning dice into a finite resource that reinforces meaningful risk-taking: spend fewer dice for greater danger, or play it safe at the cost of limited resources later.
running into enemies triggers combat
failure results in game over
Dynamic Difficulty based on decisions: Combat encounters dynamically respond to player choices, altering both encounter frequency and required roll values. Riskier narrative decisions lead to tougher challenges, reinforcing the impact of player choice across gameplay.
Example of Dynamic Difficulty
Powered by Webflow