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An ESAT student game project developed by a team of 15 graduating students
In this interview, the team shares more about the project, realised in 2025, from its concept and inspirations to the development process and the roles of its members.
Can you please give us a brief introduction and elevator pitch for the game?
Inés Jackson Martín: "Inside the Crow's Nest is a Fixed Camera Survival Horror Game, Inspired by classics of the Genre, like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
You play as the Hunter, who wakes up in a cell of a monastery after being kidnapped by a cult attempting to revive their eldritch god. To escape the player must solve puzzles and fight the mutated cultists that block your path.
To escape, the player must survive horrifying cultists, uncover dark secrets, and solve intricate puzzles that block their path. During the hunters escape, he will have to go through the Dungeons, a claustrophobic maze where sacrifices are prepared, the Library, where magic is studied and enemies lie in the halls, and the Ritual Room, where the final ritual is performed and the greatest horrors lie
What makes the project unique compared with similar games?
Inés Jackson Martín: What sets Inside the Crow's Nest apart from other projects is the commitment to face the challenge of adapting all of the different challenges and problems to get the best results. Our first challenge proved to be its fixed camera, considered an "Old-School" design, that had to be modernized for the audience. We adapted by putting emphasis to the cinematic feel this camera style allows, as it gave us the chance to create shots using silhouettes, negative spaces and perspective to build and feed that tension we intended the player to feel.
Transition from blocking phase to final rendering of the cathedral
What is the inspiration behind the concept, including visual influences for the environments and characters?
Inés Jackson Martín: The concept and visual direction of Inside the Crow's Nest drew from two main sources: the game ''No Rest for the Wicked'', and the concept artist ''Alessandro Paviollo''.
The most important visual key of our game that we wanted to highlight was the textures and materials, we considered it to be the fundamental components that would help us give depth and detail to the story we're trying to tell. ''No Rest for the Wicked'' stood out to us with its stunning visuals, hand painted materials and PBR metals. Thus, we tried to recreate it as closely as we could.
We used the same reference for the characters, relying heavily on the stylized and mutated anatomy the characters in No Rest for the Wicked, while we maintained the main characters human silhouette, although stylized to have bigger arms and smaller head, the cult's enemies had to follow a close resemblance to the bird-hybrid hierarchy deformation we proposed earlier on the narrative.
And last but not least, our environments, mood, lighting and composition was heavily inspired and guided by Alessandro Paviollo's concept art work on Nightfell, Darksouls and Darksword. His stunning work helped us achieve the atmosphere we were aiming for on each area, using light and scale to shape how the player should feel on each individual area.
Crow animation
Beginning phases of The Forgotten One
What was the size of the development team and each member's role?
Inés Jackson Martín: Looking back at the first day we started, an academic project of this size and complexity sounded almost impossible to pull through. We all had different expectations, different ideas, skills and goals, groups and projects of this size always have rocks and hills on the road, as each person faced their own personal challenges.
I remember every single teacher and tutor we came across had always been really adamant about learning organization, scheduling, communication, and accepting criticism, things that sound repetitive by nature and the easiest things to overlook until a project like this really shows you they actually matter.
In my opinion, aside from all the technical and artistic work that went into it, our project turned into the game it became thanks to the teammates who allowed us to lean on each other's shoulders while everyone poured in the effort to carry their own work.
That team cooperation is what it took to build a full vertical slice from the ground up. This had been our longest project yet, and everything took longer than we expected, as the early scale of our ambitions and ideas was huge in comparation to the time and resources we had, so we had to learn to buffer our time and scale things back more than once. It became prevalent to keep a consistent pipeline, as well as asking for feedback often which helped us catch things we'd stopped noticing ourselves. But amongst everything, we realised that one of the most important things was staying open to change and critizism despite how attached we could have been to our own work, as this is what kept us moving forward.
Our team, Crimson Covenant, has a total of 15 members. We were divided between three developmental branches:
Game Art (6 Members)
- Inés Jackson Martín - Environment Artist
- Marcel Sanchez Moreno - Environment Artist
- Carla Bernadina - Technical Artist
- Alex Iserte Ortiz - Character Animator
- Celia Ana Heck Cutanda - Character Artist
- Juan Pablo Suñer Cid - 3D Prop Artist
Game Design (3 Members)
- Juan Andres Mayorca - Level Design Dungeon, UI Design, Game Design
- Gisela Garcia Roser - Level Design Library, Game Design
- Nicolas Sanchez Gracia - Level Design Ritual Room, Game Design
Game Programming (6 Members)
- Lucas Calatayud Briva - Gameplay Programming, Sound and Interaction.
- Enrique Lopez Balbastre - UI Programming
- Daniel de Castro Isasi - Gameplay and Enemy AI Programming
- Carlos Mazcunan Blanes - Gameplay and General System Interaction
- Vicente Molina Torres - General Gameplay, Camera and Fog Programming
- Rodrigo Mico Pliego - Character Programming.
We also had the great pleasure of working alongside really talented musicians from the Berklee College of Music in Valencia, who worked alongside our team to produce music that fit the narrative and the ambience we were looking for. I had the privilege to overview and contribute hand in hand to these reunions alongside Juan Andres.
Musicians (7 Members)
- Enea Astori
- Chutong Cheng
- Handi Cui
- Alex Fortunato
- Wesley Lo
- Ryley Yip
- Barry Zhang
Special thanks to all of our teachers and producers, who helped us with the production of the game as well as teaching us everything we needed to know to be able to release the final product.
- Ismael Castellanos Ruiz
- Fernando Lara
- Lucas Soriano
- Jordi Carazo Lerma
- Joaquin Rodriguez Perez
- Diana Rodriguez
- Daniel Argudo
PLAY THE PROJECT
Discover the other ESAT project - Tiris
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