WANDERER
GAMES // WANDERER
Travel back through the ages, change the course of history and prevent the collapse of civilization.
Built from the ground up for VR, Wanderer has a unique blend of escape room style puzzles, tactile hands on interactions and action arcade sequences to bring you the ultimate time travel adventure. Are you ready to walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before you?
The Journey
Wanderer was a true labour of love. After falling head-over-heels for VR, we built a prototype for a time-travel game in 2018. In 2019 we secured a green light and funding from PlayStation for PSVR1, and kicked off full production later that year. That support let us scale up the team and evolve a small demo into a fully fledged 8–10 hour time-travel adventure epic.
Creatively, bringing seven distinct eras of history to life was a huge challenge. Technically, it was even bigger: the core loop lets players jump between eras almost instantly, at will. That had major knock-on effects for narrative design, persistent world state, streaming/loading, and save systems - all while still hitting demanding VR frame times and a high bar for visual fidelity.
We worked our asses off. I led a tight team of around 15 people, and over roughly two and a half years we built and shipped our vision - to fantastic critical reception, including multiple VR GOTY nominations, 85% positive reviews on Steam, and an 81 Metacritic score.
My Key Contributions
Made in Unreal Engine 4 I helped lead a small team, having to wear many hats whilst also staying focused on my core strengths. Here are the areas where I feel I added the most value:
+ Game Design: Working closely with narrative, I grey-boxed levels in parallel with Articy flows, then tested and tuned for spatial design, wayfinding, pacing, and puzzle directionality. I designed dozens of puzzles built specifically around VR’s strengths - tactile, hands-on interactions that feel physical and intuitive. I also worked extensively on the games on-boarding and tutorial design and systems.
+ Level Art: I personally built the majority of Wanderer’s environments in UE4 - from set-dressing and poly-painting to materials, landscapes, and foliage. I also handled a large share of scene optimization using in-engine tools (LODs, HLODs, shader simplification, profiling, etc.) to keep performance tight for VR.
+ Creative Direction: I oversaw the project’s creative vision: guiding art and character development, directing voice sessions, producing key art, directing motion-capture shoots and ensuring every element fit a cohesive world and tone.
+ Narrative Design: Wanderer was my first deep dive into narrative scripting, primarily in Articy. The game’s non-linear, timeline-hopping story required a custom approach, so we built our own Articy system to support it. I structured narrative flows, built the hint system and hint manager, and wrote hundreds of lines of dialogue. You can read more about that here.
+ Marketing : I helped create marketing material including trailers, key art and socials as well as help create core marketing strategies.
TRAILERS & VIDEO.
IMAGES.
ben@markby.games