Gardens of New Amsterdam
Product Management and Design
How might we go back in time to see the world in different times?
During my summer 2024 internship, I worked with a game developer aiming to answer that question. Through the use of digital worlds, created on Unreal Engine, we built multiple historically-accurate game levels of Manhattan throughout time, where users can walk through levels and interact with historical moments and icons
MANHATTAN, 1664
The work
From ideation to iteration to final design, I facilitated the creative and technical components of this work, determining visual details and creating a story flow for users. Leading and managing an international team of designers, developers, and programmers, I worked alongside professionals to create an immersive view of Manhattan’s long history.
Task: Determine the crops and foliage grown by Dutch settlers in 1664 New Amsterdam and create assets of these crops in the video game level of 1664.
Method: Primary accounts and an annotated version of the Castello Plan to indicate crop placement. Adobe Photoshop and Excel to create crop annotations and annotation key.
Challenges: How do I capture the variety of crops and accurately guess the prevalence of foliage types in 1664 New Amsterdam? How do I properly inform and direct team members to execute this work correctly and efficiently?
Insights: By creating a map overlay feature in Unreal Engine, designers on my team can directly place crops and foliage onto my annotations.
The Castello Plan - A Detailed Map of New Amsterdam
Using the Castello Plan, a detailed 1660s map of lower Manhattan, and historic Dutch gardens, I constructed an annotated version of the Castello Plan to determine crop placements in the Unreal Engine game level.
Castello Plan
Real Dutch Garden
An Annotated Castello Plan - Crops and Foliage
Using historical references from the 1600s, I design an annotated map of the Castello Plan to guide our level designers’ creation of virtual gardens and greenery.
Given the level of detail of this project, with over 1,000 different digital assets, this annotated plan needed to be precise. Each highlighted dot, square, and rectangle represents a different garden plot, tree, or flowering garden. This zoomed in look shows you the level of detail I undertook to ensure that our virtual world is as immersive and realistic as possible. The key illustrates the different types of crops we implemented in our design.
Zooming In
Final Product
