Feral
Creator & Solo Developer
An independent 2.5D dystopian RPG — prowl the neon ruins of Lyseris as Maya, a feral cat in a city that forgot the sun. Built solo, from narrative to engine.
Feral is my independent video game — a 2.5D dystopian RPG I am building entirely alone. You play as Maya, a feral cat threading the neon ruins of Lyseris, a city that forgot the sun. It began as a love letter to my own cat and grew into a world: its story, its characters, its environments, its systems, and its interface all imagined and built by one person.
- Role
- Solo — everything
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Tools
- Blender · Substance · Adobe
- Status
- In development · 2024–
The World
Every world starts with a question. Mine was simple: what does the future look like from four inches off the ground, through the eyes of something that hunts at night?
Maya
The protagonist is a cat — small, quick, and unimpressed by the collapse around her. Playing as an animal reframes everything: no dialogue trees, no menus mid-street, just instinct, curiosity, and the vertical, shadow-hugging way a cat reads a room. Maya is named after my own; the whole project is really about seeing the world the way she does.
Lyseris
The city is the antagonist. Lyseris is a dystopia of neon and rust — humanity gone, its infrastructure still humming out of habit, its signs still glowing for no one. It is beautiful and hostile at once, a place designed to be prowled rather than toured. Every alley had to feel like it kept going after the camera left.
Bringing Maya to Life
A believable creature is the hardest thing to fake. Maya had to read as feline in silhouette, in weight, and in the smallest idle twitch — long before she ever moved.
Concept & sculpt
I started in 2D to find her proportions and attitude, then rebuilt her in 3D in Blender — sculpting, retopologising, and UV-unwrapping a model clean enough to animate and light like a hero asset.
Texture, rig & animate
Materials in Substance gave her fur, wear, and the faint neon sheen of the city on her coat. A custom rig and a hand-authored animation set — prowl, leap, startle, groom — turned the model into a character with a pulse.
Building Lyseris
A city of neon and rust
I built Lyseris as a mood before a map — deciding what the light did, where the fog sat, and which signs still flickered. The look leans on a tight palette: deep dark, hot crimson, and the sickly teal of dying displays.
Designed to be explored
Levels are laid out for a cat, not a person — ledges, gaps, and hidden lines of sight that reward climbing and patience over sprinting through. Verticality is the real map.
Light as mood
Lighting and VFX carry the emotion. Volumetric haze, reactive neon, and pooled shadow do more storytelling than any text box could, and give the player a reason to just stop and look.
Systems in Motion
A world only comes alive when it reacts. Two systems carry most of that weight: how Maya moves, and how the things in the dark respond to her.
Personality through animation
Movement is where character lives. Blended animation states, weight, and little unscripted idles let Maya feel present and alive rather than driven — the difference between a puppet and a creature.
Predators and prey
Enemy AI gives Lyseris teeth. Perception, patrol, and pursuit behaviours make the city feel watched, so stealth and timing matter and every crossing carries a little risk.
The Interface
A HUD that disappears
The interface had to respect the fiction. I kept the in-world HUD minimal and diegetic — information surfaces only when it is needed and dissolves the moment it is not, so nothing breaks the spell of the city.
Menus with character
Away from gameplay — title, journal, options — the UI gets to perform, carrying the same neon-noir type and motion language as the world so the whole product feels authored by one hand.
What I learned
Building a world alone
Doing every discipline myself — story, art, animation, engineering, UI — is slow, but it makes the world coherent in a way a hand-off rarely is. Every decision answers to the same taste, and constraints became the aesthetic rather than a compromise of it.
What's next
Feral is still in development. The next stretch is depth over breadth — fewer, richer streets, a tighter combat and stealth loop, and getting Maya into more hands to feel where the city needs to push back harder.
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