Island of Winds
A story-driven adventure through a mystical 17th-century Iceland, built in Unreal Engine at Parity Games — I worked on gameplay mechanics, AI systems, and performance optimization.
- Unreal Engine
- C++
- Gameplay
- AI Systems
- Performance
My role
Software engineer at Parity Games (2024–2025) — a studio of ~20 with a four-strong engineering team. I worked on gameplay mechanics and AI systems, drove open-world performance optimization (World Partition, Nanite), and polished the game through bug fixes and system refinements — plus internal tools that sped up the team's development workflows.
Outcome
In production at Parity Games with publisher ESDigital Games — coming to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox in 2026, wishlistable on Steam now.
Island of Winds is a story-driven adventure game set in a fantastical 17th-century Iceland, steeped in the country’s actual folklore and mythology. You play Brynhildur, a young Balance Keeper who uses magic, empathy, and puzzle-solving to uncover ancient secrets and restore harmony to a fractured world — a game where “empathy encounters” with legendary creatures matter as much as combat.
The story turns on two women: Brynhildur, and her mentor Hrymja, whose abduction sets the journey in motion.
It’s developed by Parity Games in Reykjavík and published by ESDigital Games, headed to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox in 2026. This is my first commercial title as a professional game developer — the craft I’d been building through research, game jams, and teaching, applied to a full production with a team and a shipping deadline.
My contribution
I joined Parity as a software engineer in 2024, working in Unreal Engine across the game’s systems:
- Gameplay mechanics — implementing and refining the moment-to-moment interactions that carry the adventure, from spellcasting to puzzles.
- AI systems — behavior for the creatures and characters that populate the island, from legendary beings to ambient wildlife.
- Performance optimization — profiling and tuning the streamed open world with Unreal’s World Partition and Nanite, so a dense, atmospheric island holds a stable frame rate on console-class hardware as it loads in around the player.
- Polish — a key role in the long tail of bug fixes and system refinements that turn a promising build into a shippable game.
- Developer tools — internal workflow tooling that shortens iteration time for the whole team.
Working on IoW meant touching everything from Blueprint-facing gameplay code down to the profiler — on a studio of about twenty, with a four-person engineering team small enough that ownership was real and broad, and disciplined enough to ship. The island itself is the other protagonist: turf-house interiors, black-sand coasts, and highland canyons, all of which have to run smoothly while the simulation underneath stays believable.
Credits
Island of Winds is made by the team at Parity Games — see the official site for the full credits. Key art and screenshots © Parity Games.
Want something built like this? I'm available for contract work.