The Archivist is a cozy museum management game built in Unity by a team of 4. In this game, players run their own archive where visitors bring in various mysterious objects. You have to inspect and investigate these items through different unique minigames, decide whether you want to negotiate and buy them, and then display them on your exhibition floors. Players have full control over how they arrange the museum layout and design their displays, making it a relaxed experience focused on curation, discovery, and fun minigames.
For this project, I stepped into a hybrid role handling the environment art, audio design, and technical features.
For the soundtrack, I composed a cozy and cute track that features two themes rolled into one to support the game's day/night cycle. The first half of the track is happier to match the daytime gameplay, while the second half shifts into a slightly more mysterious vibe for the night. The soundtrack is primarily built around the piano, with additional flute, harp, and violins to create a relaxed, comforting atmosphere similar to some of the iconic Minecraft themes. Alongside the music, I designed and implemented the sound effects to ground the players in the space as they interact with the museum and its artifacts.
On the art side, I built almost the entire world from scratch, modeling and texturing the interior museum archive, unique 3D artifacts, and the outside environment with a custom skybox. To speed up the asset creation, I built a procedural node system in Blender that generated houses automatically to any length and height, and used particle effects to create and texture different types of trees. I also used curves to design a large, stylized tree inside the archive meant for displaying paintings. On the technical side, I implemented all these assets into Unity and coded the interactive elements. I built the main menu, engineered the day/night cycle, and programmed a fully functional in-game computer screen that players can interact with to navigate menus and view stats. Finally, I handled the audio integration, bringing the custom soundtrack and sound effects directly into the game engine to match the gameplay triggers.