— PROJECT NAME
Colony 7
— DATE
Jan 19th 2025 – Feb 20th 2025
Colony 7 is a walking sim set on the futuristic, Colony 7. Each day, the player wakes up and is able to explore the environment as they please, with the only goal to have a place to stay by the end of the night. Player's must interact with NPCs and complete certain tasks in order to find a couch to sleep on for the night.
In this level, the player finds themselves on Krestle Arc, a city that sits just outside of Krestle Nova. For this level, we follow the Cayden Path by meeting a character at the bar who has a favor to ask of the player. Completing the objective will grant the player with somewhere to sleep by the end of the night.
Link to the documentation:
Level Map:
Critical Path:
Key Components
Below are some of the toolsets and processes I used during development
Modular Meshes
Building this city was a daunting task at first, however, I knew that reusing assets where I could would be key to developing the atmosphere I wanted to achieve for the project. Building out assets big and small to fill the streets and small areas with mundane objects would go a long way to developing the atmosphere of the environment.
By having lots of small and mundane models, I was able to fill the small areas of the environment with elements that looked unique while reusing assets that I had already created. I had a mixture of grouped objects and single objects that allowed me to assemble these small areas quickly so that I would be able to focus on other aspects of level design.
Pipe Blueprint
While building up this city, I wanted to draw attention upwards as much as possible to use the scale of the buildings while instilling a sense of dread the city is meant to be known for. Using overhead items like lights and signs lit up the sky to draw attention, while pipes lined the sides of buildings and move across spaces to cast shadows on the player also meant to draw attention. In order to build the pipes, I used a spline that had various meshes attached to each of the points. This would allow me to scale the pipes along buildings in any way I needed to do.
The contrast between the lights and pipes have this give and take, forcing the players eyes upward as they move through the level. While this prototype level features placeholder models, it makes use of shapes and outlines to build up the overwhelming environment to simulate what the level would turn into after an art pass.
Elevator Blueprint
While looking at this environment from below showcases this dreadful environment, I wanted to bring the player above the city to see everything from above. With this as my goal, and with leading the player here through the storyline, I needed to get the player from the ground to the tops of the buildings. In order to do that, I created elevators using a spline to denote the starting and ending points of the elevator. I developed it in this way so that I could reuse the elevator blueprint elsewhere in a quick and modular fashion.
finding a way to bring the player to the top reaches of the city was meant to show the city in a new light. If I were to continue this project, the gameplay would function by allowing the player to do whatever they so pleased during the day and finding a place to stay by night. Going through this critical path aligns with that intention of sharing unique stories of people living in this universe. This final location, while dirty and unkept, shows the scale of the city from a new perspective.
Link to the documentation: