Na Kala – Rike Ziegler

Na Kala is a 3D single-player first person exploration game. The game is about a person who lives in a dreary black and white world. One day they find a camera through which they can see colors again. The player’s task is to bring the colors back into the world by searching and recreating photos from a long lost photo album.

In this project I work with a team of 10 people. Na Kala was the first game where I had the initial idea and worked as a Co-Director as well as a Co-Producer. In the directing role I was responsible for the environment design, level design and game design. Further tasks included the lighting of levels and test the game for gameplay quality and bugs.

I also contributed to the project as a 3D Artist. For the intended look I had to created each environment twice. Once in the colourful version and once in the black and white version. I created and shaded the environment in Unity and created additional assets in Maya.

In my role as a Co-Producer I was responsible for the coordination and prioritisation of the tasks as well as the communication between the departments.

A challenge in this project was learning how to balance the scope with a vision. Since I was involved in the creative vision as well as in the organisational part, I had to make sure that the vision was kept while also maintaining a manageable workload for everyone. I was lucky that for this game the core team was working together very well. Since this production was fully remote due to the pandemic, it was difficult to create a sense of team spirit. But a lot of us knew each other before and I think that help also to integrate the new people who joined. We were in constant communication and online game nights definitely helped with keeping the spirits high.

A gameplay video and the trailer of the project can be found here.