What Came After?…
What Came After is an inhouse project self funded by Nucleolus. This narrative driven adventure game was designed by myself and another member of the team. The game explores themes of death, dementia and deforestation, which are routed deep within the games narrative. This side scroller fantasy game is influenced by the players actions; what they find along their journey will help paint a picture and allow them to get to the bottom of a mystery that’s started to form in their world. This concept gave me the opportunity to: design a new style the company could use, work on writing a game narrative, and learn the basics of terrain painting in Unity. This is still in its early stages, although a setting and story has been established, it still needs a lot of refining and fleshing out before the idea as a whole is officially pitched.
Narrative:
What Came After opens with the introduction of the protagonist, a wise old woman living out the rest of her days on the outskirts of a great forest. She has a quiet life and lives alone, however there is a nearby village where her best friend resides. The culture in this world dictates that when a person is born a piece of bark is stripped from one of the last remaining great sacred trees, and is made into a totem. People look after and carry this totem with them all of their lives, with a general belief that their character will rub off onto it and help connect them to the spirit world upon death. After being introduced to the world and the protagonist, and after a brief tutorial, the day ends. With another day behind her, the wise old woman wraps up what she is doing, takes in the view across the fields, and goes to bed. Peacefully in her sleep she draws her final breathe, and her spirit fades into the sky. Here the actual game begins.
The player is then introduced to the after life, where they can roam and interact with other spirits. Lost loved ones that they haven’t seen in years welcome the player to a new home. The spirits live peacefully in the great forest, or they had lived peacefully up until recently. Something mysterious is causing the spirits to change… Randomly some of the spirits of the forest have started to turn feral, their character is fading and who they are is slipping away. A village elder tasks the player to find the source of what is happening. As the most recent spirit to enter into this world, they have the best idea of what life is like on the other side, which could be influencing these changes that are happening. The player must then go on an adventure to find out what is causing this new change in the spirit world, and hopefully put a stop to it. The decisions they make will have an impact on the ending, and they will be tasked with questioning and putting their own wellbeing behind others.
Gallery
Below you can see concept art I produced, style research, final renders, asset lists and character concepts.
Concept Art
Moodboard 1
Moodboard 2
House Render 1
House Render 2
House Render 3
House Render 4
All Assets
Masked Spirit Concept 1
Masked Spirit Concept 2
Work in Unity
After creating assets for this project, I wanted to make sure everything would work smoothly in Unity, our companies chosen game engine. Although I had some basic teaching of the software during University, this was an opportunity for me to learn about and create LODs (level of details) for each and every model I made. LODs help the optimisation of games as they reduce the detail of an objects mesh based on the distance of it to a camera. This means that everything close is high quality, where as things far in the distance are rendered at a low quality, gradually getting simpler and simpler the further away from the camera they are. This helps with processing as the game engine isn’t working to render the most complex version of every asset within a scene. After learning about and creating LODs, I then moved on to learn how to terrain paint. Although the games idea ended up being a side scroller utilising 3D assets for depth perception, the original idea was to have the game take place over a small open world map. This research was needed at the time, and although it is no longer needed for this project, it was an interesting and useful skill for me to learn about.
