Create Your First Project
Start adding your projects to your portfolio. Click on "Manage Projects" to get started
Sleep Is Working
Project type
First-person ARPG demo
Platform
Windows PC
Engine
Unreal Engine 5
Location
The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Duration
7 months
Completion
2025
Team Size
1
My Role
Concept and worlding-building, research, gameplay design, modelling, prop and texture placement, illustrations, lighting, event scripting, dialog script, custom feature scripting, tech art
Sleep Is Working is a narrative-driven RPG set in the Sleepless City, a 24/7 urban machine where surveillance architecture and bioengineering normalise unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. Here, the Janus modification lets one brain hemisphere rest while the other works—at a cost. Because REM is cut from the cycle, citizens depend on REM-inducing drugs, turning rest into a managed commodity. Drawing on speculative design to invite debate rather than decree, the project critiques the cultural glorification of overwork and the erosion of private life.
Players inhabit the protagonist who has received the Janus modification but cannot control it. To keep their job at the Janus Tower—an illuminated moonlight/panopticon that governs the city—the protagonist began “faking” half-sleep with REM drugs, risking neurological decline. Core mechanics align with this fractured condition: UREM split-screen perception gives reality and dream concurrently; Nightmares manifest trauma and the day’s unresolved stresses. Through role-playing, Sleep Is Working asks how we might reclaim intimacy, attention, and agency inside systems that monetise even our dreams.
Download project portfolio: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1diPi8RaxJQZ1r6OALJ2Japz0AY6H_kbe/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=103550928643873973892&rtpof=true&sd=true
Demo walkthrough youtube link: https://youtu.be/baicv09uRkI
Download demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CfCKHujHPPAkELtGKHPE9EuHuxkCrdjd/view?usp=drive_link
