South of the Circle (2020)

Genre: Adventure, Story

Platforms: PC, PS4, XBox, iOS, Android

Website: stateofplaygames.com/south-of-the-circle

Roles: Design, prototyping, research

This was our most ambitious project to date — a fully motion-captured thriller with a multi-Oscar-winning cast.

Set in 1960s Antarctica, the game places the player in an alternative history in which the Antarctic Treaty didn’t happen, thus failing to de-escalate Cold War tensions.

I was heavily involved in the early stages of this project carrying out research, concept design and prototyping. The game was released as an Apple Arcade Original in 2020. It went on to be nominated for an Apple Design Award and DICE award. It has since been released on PC and console.

Early prototypes

After the initial research phase we began prototyping gameplay in Unity. I modelled various buildings, vehicles and props, and worked with the developers to build tools that we could use for scripting levels. This eventually became a vertical slice which helped secure funding for full production.

Early Unity prototype from 2018

Tool building in Unity

Screenshot from the final game

Taking terrain literally

In order to quickly generate some authentic-looking terrain, I used satellite data from various databases and used it as a heightmap in Unity. With only a simple cel shader the result made for a nice backdrop.

Satellite elevation data

Cel-shaded terrain generated from height maps

Creative director Luke Whittaker with the cast, fully kitted out with face mocap rigs

Motion capture

I was also involved with the first few trial motion capture sessions, helping the creative director and tech lead to establish a good workflow for working with the cast and handling all the recorded data.

The script!