The Scholar's Side Quest
The Scholar's Side Quest is a collaborative design project of a third-person Action-adventure Game. The story takes place in Letter Town — a small town under the control of a phantasmagoria.
I led a team of 17 skilled students to complete the development of the flow of the quest, which involved authoring the 17-page narrative script, creating a major scene, and producing 13 detailed animation cutscenes using Unreal Engine 4.
- ROLE
- Level / Combat Designer
- TEAM SIZE
- Team project
- ENGINE
- UE4 · PC
- DURATION
- 4 months
Google Drive What I Learned From This Project?
Main Contributions
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Video Game Development： Led the "Scholar Side Quest" design for an action RPG, including authoring a 17-page narrative script, engineering a major scene, and producing 13 intricate animation cutscenes with Unreal Engine 4.
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Project Planning： Directed a skilled team of 17 students to ascertain project requirements and set forth clear objectives and deliverables.
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Leadership： Strategically steered meetings to synchronize team progress, gathered responses and needs, monitored project scope, and resolved roadblocks and issues, contributing to a cohesive team and the success of the project.
Key Features
Character and Narrative
Scholar Side Quest: Game Script
Hun (Protagonist)
Hun is one of the Lord of the Underworld’s sons, trained to become a top swordsman.
Li An
Li An is the only daughter of a hidden illusionist family. Naturally forgetful, she was deemed by her family to have no aptitude for illusion arts.
Scholar, Lv Chuan
Lv Chuan was born into an official family, but he is passionate about writing novels and refuses to pursue an official career.
General Xia, Xia Ming
General Xia was once a great court general. He came to Letter Town intending to break the illusion, but was instead trapped by it, staying to protect the town.
Maid, Cui Yun
Cui Yun serves as a maid in Lv Chuan’s household.
Quest Flow
Gameplay
Dialogue System
Players must interact with NPCs to advance the quest.
The game uses a dialogue plugin to power core dialogue functionality. Cutscenes automatically trigger at the end of each dialogue sequence, merging narrative delivery and quest state updates into a single interaction node.
Collection Quest
8 letters forgotten by Li An are hidden throughout Letter Town.
Scattered in buildings, deep in the bamboo grove, and the mansion. Collecting each triggers a memory-flashback dialogue fragment that assembles Li An’s complete backstory, tying exploration gameplay to narrative delivery.
Combat
As a side quest, combat is intentionally lightweight: short combo chains and dodges that serve quest progression rather than competitive depth. My responsibilities included setting enemy counts per area, spawn point placement, and combat zone boundaries.
Animation Cutscenes
The quest features 13 cutscene animations in total.
Produced using UE4 Sequencer, each scene is bound to a specific quest node — key narrative moments all have dedicated animations to amplify emotional impact.
Level Design and Iteration
Environment Design
Wang Lian Mansion is the game’s core zone. I was responsible for the full layout planning and iterative level design — from reference gathering, prototype blockout, circulation validation, and asset replacement to lighting polish, through multiple iteration passes.
Animation and Cutscenes
Scholar Side Quest: Cutscenes Storyboard
Completed skeleton rigging and skin binding in Blender, produced character animations in Maya, and integrated all animations and cutscene editing in Unreal Engine 4.
Gallery
