Final Year Project
Perilous Pilgrim
Unreal 5
IMPORTANT
My contribution for this product is the Level Design and Environment Art.
With secondary, Visual scripting for UI and Gameplay.
Additionally calculating a material, for the landscape, to apply snow in the mountains, rock on angled terrain; more explained further down.
Assets including buildings, textures, foliage, props were obtained from the free Unreal Market.
About
Perilous Pilgrim
This project "Perilous Pilgrim" is an exploration fantasy island with a detailed environment. The player searches an abandoned village named peaceful farms, with the help of UI interface elements to inform and guide the player. Peaceful farms is the southern section of the island which holds secret caves with a key to aid the players objective to reach the mountain peak.
The narrative is that the player is a pilgrim on a journey up the mountain to complete their master's bidding. This mountain is the centre point of the island and biggest which overlooks the player.
The main scope is to highlight my major skillsets such as level design skills and environment, I also wanted to implement my programming skills: visual scripting and technical programmer aspects. With that I designed this island to demonstrate these skills.
The Product
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Before/After
This video compares an early build of the island to the final product in its overall scale and improvements in a birds eye view around the island.
Gameplay Video
I wanted to create my own gameplay assets that are similar to other exploration focused games, such as Outer Wilds and Zelda Breath of the Wild.
For gameplay, I created grapple hook and a phase ability.
Grapple Hook allowed player to reach unreachable heights, this was made to add vertically in the level, enabling the player the freedom to not be limited in boxed areas and in a linear path. The phase ability would highlight interactable objects such as important narrative information or grapple points, aswell as mana source and dangerous areas. Also by name, would allow player to phase through specific objects that may hide a path or narrative information. Finally, phase allowed the player to be less affected by gravity, allowing player to jump large distances and take less fall damage.
UI was used to help the player to navigate by showing a map of the island and listing all their discoveries. Aswell as allowing them to read ingame journals and notes about the narrative to help sync with the environment and objective.
With this in mind, I set to create an island which will be divided into sections, each section will expand on the gameplay and challenge the player while the first section the player is introduced too, Peaceful Farms, will show each gameplay mechanic. To help the player in exploring, I created key important locations like the village and buildings to gravitate the player to and to then to inform them their objective through narrative and environment story telling, as well as UI.
Development Area.
VVVVVVVVVVV
Pre-Production
In this stage, I was set to making an Island for the player to explore with video games such as Outer Wilds, Fallout, Zelda Breath of the Wild helping inspire the gameplay to encourage the player in uncovering the answers without intervention or obvious direct approach.
For the design of the island I picked Scotland and Iceland and bit of Canada to meld a tangible island together that had mountains reaching across to the ocean splitting the Island into sections. I planned on having the player explore each section and its civilisations inhabiting them.
The gameplay objective was to have the player climb the mountain by gathering answers and items from each section to progress further up the mountain. So when climbing up the mountain, I wanted the player to see the overall island like in the video game Skyrim.
The plan was cut to only one section however I still kept this as reference to look onward passed the mountains, but not to visit.
In the choice of engine, I picked Unreal 5 as it contained plugins that would benefit me greatly. This was the Water Plugin and Landmass, these greatly improved progress as I would not have to time consume carefully crafting an island and mountains for a long period of time.
Though the plugins still needed artistic touch meaning it wasn't an instant creation and had problems with blending together with the coast.
Water also had Rivers, that made it simple to apply streams down from mountains to the coast.
Production
Pre-Alpha
Alpha
This is the stage where I focused on the Peaceful Farms sector, where the player will be introduced to first originally. The goal for this sector was to act as tutorial in using the gameplay mechanics and understand the narrative, through environment story telling. The design I aimed for was to have multiple areas different heights that would hold more valuable information, anything the player saw was aimed to be a point of interest.
I also cut the mountain climb to be a lot shorter but kept its visual views of the island, this still meant I had to blockout some structures in other sectors.
Beta
In this stage I wanted to implement the acquired assets to help with the overall environment and atmosphere. And to what I can work with the limiting assets, though surprisingly modular that helped for what I desired in the cut version.
Polish
Polishing the Landscape Material to not break when applying path and farmland texture. Added structures and intended to show these have aged and are starting to collapse with the village centre showing this fact the most.
I also added this to the other areas of the island for the player to see from afar like the Human City and Elven City.