Luke Tuiqereqere

Thare; fabula est occultatum

Bachelor of Design Interactive Indie Game Unreal Engine Environmental Storytelling Narrative Environment

Exploration and adventure, jump in to this new fantasy world where you the player learn the secrets of the land of Thare. The vast land is blocked off from the outside world and you must uncover the reason for it's secrecy and what it may truly be hiding and if it is valuable.


“Thare; fabula est occultatum” is a large open world exploration video game focusing on art and environment design. The game world is created through an iterative design process of concept art, photo bashing, and grey boxing. In the game, the player collects crystal shards overrunning the world, each shard adds to a journal exploring the narrative and why these shards are so important to the world of “Thare”.
Play demo through my above


Concept art is a key part in game development where it can create a visual idea for all departments of a gaming company and is able to help developers fully grasp the theme/ motive and final product.

For my project I used a method of concepting an area of the game, making a 3D grey box of the level in Unreal Engine, then photo bashing over a screenshot of the grey box. This method allowed me to create a visually interesting world that was tied to the narrative.

I used Unreal Engine for this project because of its ease of use and visual scripting tool Blueprints.

To showcase the concept art to the player I added a journal mechanic. As you collect different shards in the world, a new journal entry is added. This consists of illustrations and photo bashed paint overs annotated with the main characters thoughts explaining the narrative.

The story and world I have built is a personal scenario that I made and attempted to previously make but never succeeded at.  This project gave me a second chance to explore this scenario. Inspired by many works of explorative/ sand box games (I.e. Horizon Zero dawn;2017, God of War; and Red dead Redemption 2) and visually stunning films (I.e. Avatar, Lord of the rings and star wars) I was able to conceptualize my work and create a large open world game.