Navigate a surreal dreamscape of trauma to reconnect with your inner child and finally heal.
Obscurum - Light beyond the Nightmare's Veil is an atmospheric 2.5D narrative platformer that abstractly explores the psychological stages of trauma, repression, and grief.
Guide the protagonist through a surreal dreamscape of long-forgotten worlds, confronting personified emotional parasites and a powerful final boss that embodies their lost inner child.
By mastering precision and combat mechanics, players unlock vital abilities to push past the nightmare's veil. Designed to balance touching, interpretive storytelling, the game features procedurally generated intermediate levels—delivering a challenging, mechanically rewarding journey through emotional highs and lows.
University Award
Best Mechanics
Project Overview
Genre: 2.5D Plattformer
Engine: Unity
Platform: PC (Windows)
Mode: Single Player
Language: German/English
Team Size: 9 People (3 Game Designer, Lead
Game Designer)
Dev Time: 6 Months
Status: Playable Demo
Playtime: Approx. 30 min
Features: Symbolic Combat &
Manifested Trauma,
Environmental Storytelling
Semester: 3
My responsibilities
Game Design Lead
Department Leadership & Agile Management
Lead Game Designer and Scrum Master, managing task allocation via GitHub, defining backlog priorities, and ensuring all deliverables met the team’s high "Definition of Done"
Meeting Facilitation & Structuring
Organized, structured, and facilitated department-internal Game Design meetings to align the vision, pitch core concepts, and systematically steer the team out of creative dead ends into productive workflows.
Narrative Design & Psychological World-Building
Concepted and iterated the deep, textless narrative structure of the 2.5D platformer, abstracting Verena Kast’s four phases of grief model to translate the psychological themes of defense mechanisms and the inner child into a cohesive world layout.
Systems & Level Design
Combat System Design
Authored, structured, and balanced a complex combat system from scratch, defining behavior for specialized enemy archetypes ("Hauntings" split into ranged "Tower" and melee "Creeper") and decoupling basic attacks from mana into cooldown-based combos.
Mechanics & Systems
Designed and balanced the metaphorical core mechanics, including the "Traum Mana" resource loop (for platform creation, shielding, and healing) and a memory-driven ability progression system split into "Tokens of Light" and "Stamina Tokens".
Level Design
Designed and greyboxed level sections directly in Unity; successfully optimized the team's level mapping workflow by introducing digital sketching pipelines and consciously applying the golden ratio for enhanced player guidance and visual composition.
Communication & Quality Assurance
Playtesting & UX
Organized and prepared a playtesting session with an online questionnaire to improve the User experience.
Bug Reporting
Documented technical issues to ensure a polished and stable demo experience.
Trailer Production
Produced and edited the official game trailer.