Kerem Pauwels Portfolio
Escape Room (Winter 2024)
A physical escape room where players search for a professor who injured himself following an obscure online ritual. I created diegetic artwork that appeared within the game's fictional forum posts—illustrations depicting the dangerous procedure (ingesting chemicals, spinning, and "opening" the skull to absorb others' brain power). One piece served as visual exposition; another tutorialized a puzzle requiring players to mix the same concoction to restore the professor.
Full design documentation is available here.
Tools: Procreate
I'm especially proud of the small details: NPCs whose heads track the player, dialogue that responds to proximity, and a densely populated opening scene that establishes the world immediately.
Tools: Unity, C#
Play Paracosm here
You must navigate their gunfire, listening for cues in the arguments they're having over your will. You collect the pieces of a drawing your children made when they were little, literally reframing the drawing into a positive memory of family.
The most difficult part of this project was the revisions we had to make. Our first week produced a much more abstract concept with a similar story that our teacher found too ungrounded. We quickly pivoted to a trench warfare idea and chose Vietnam as a location since it made time for the time period the game was set in. We had to pivot from that soon too however, since our teacher wanted us to have some form of personal connection to any depicted conflict.
We had to go through a lot of documentation and feared falling behind other groups who had their concept accepted earlier. But in the end, having to think about our project and come up with ideas rapidly made our final product look better and more considerate.
This project was made in Unity and C#
I took on a lot of different roles but was mainly focused on the VFX, shooting scripts, particle system implementation, and populating the level with props that matched the real life location.
Between Lines (Spring 2026)
Made for the final project in a Level Design class. Our group of six had four weeks to make a full game level, the first two weeks of which were centered entirely on planning and documentation.
The story told is the final days of a veteran of the India-Pakistan wars over Kashmir. He's now bedridden, and before dying sees and hears the arguments of his two children manifested as soldiers in the war.
ShepherdXR, Lead Artist (Winter-Spring 2025)
An educational VR game teaching math concepts from arithmetic to algebra. As Lead Artist, I owned all visual aspects of the project—VFX, level design, and post-processing. I designed environments in Unity, built 3D models in Blender, wrote gameplay scripts in C#, and playtested on Quest 3.
You can see Game Visuals here and Environment Design here .
Paracosm (Summer 2025)
A narrative puzzle game where players recover lost memories of a forgotten homeland. Working with two teammates, I led development—handling nearly all coding and designing the full story arc.
The player escapes a homeland that has been erased from collective memory. In Level 1, they gather artifacts proving its existence and present them to skeptical townsfolk. Level 2 immerses them in a timed vision of the homeland itself. In Level 3, they return to town and must persuade each NPC using evidence from the earlier levels.
What Remains of Me
(Fall 2024)
What Remains of Me is puzzle game developed by a 100-person studio class at Northeastern University simulating professional production workflows—Agile processes, Jira tracking, QA scripts, and weekly standups.
I served on the Narrative Discipline and the Level 4 team, where I authored dialogue, wrote design documentation, and created pixel art assets. My background in creative writing shaped the story content, and I left with deeper skills in studio collaboration and visual storytelling.
Tools: Ink, Ren'Py, Unity, Jira
Serenity Quest (Spring 2024)
A card game set in a psychiatric hospital where players balance sensory input to avoid overload. I designed and wrote all narrative content—flavor text for every card and the mechanics for "month cards" that cycle each turn.
After completing the narrative work, I helped laminate physical cards at our makerspace and designed the pitch sheet. Full card documentation, including flavor text, is available here.
Tools: Procreate, Adobe Photoshop, lamination equipment
The Myth of Chain
(Summer 2023)
A tongue-in-cheek parody of classic Zelda games, built in four days at the Champlain Game Academy. I designed all levels, modeled the goblin and tank enemies in 3D, and produced the full sound design—my first venture into each of these disciplines.
Note: The itch.io version has audio issues due to a last-minute HTML conversion. Standalone sound files are available here.
Tools: Unity, Maya, Blender, Audacity
Recoil (Summer 2023)
My first collaborative game development experience—a VR adventure-shooter-platformer built in two weeks during Northeastern's pre-college program. The core mechanic: a "Power-Gun" whose recoil propels players into the air.
I designed and tested the shooting range level, developed the branching narrative, and debugged the recoil physics system.
Tools: Unity, Padlet
Settlers of Hex (Winter 2022)
A board game designed during my high school's annual project week, mentored by Lior Sabag, co-founder of MagicYard. Over one week of virtual collaboration, I wrote a complete game design document and created card assets. Each character explores a different mechanical application. I playtested at home using cards from existing games.
Tools: Procreate
Settlers of Hex (Winter 2022)
A board game designed during my high school's annual project week, mentored by Lior Sabag, co-founder of MagicYard. Over one week of virtual collaboration, I wrote a complete game design document and created card assets. Each character explores a different mechanical application. I playtested at home using cards from existing games.
Tools: Procreate