Paradise
Personal Project | Jan 2020 - May 2020
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Engine and Tools
UE4 | Adobe Illustrator
Mechanics
The mechanics are traditional first person shooter to have few elements that distract from the environment. In pursuit of that, the enemies are introduced into the world by being 'cloned' in by using a spawn system I created.
Lore is told to the player through environmental story telling and a pickup blueprint I created.
My Work
Over the course of building Paradise I was responsible for conceptualization, whiteboxing, blueprinting playtesting, set dressing, lighting, and optimization. The work I am not responsible for were the base mechanics and the art assets from the asset packs. with the caveat that I modified many of the mechanics and art assets. Spoken in more detail of below.
Asset Packs
Modular SciFi Command Center | Modular SciFi: Props 1 | SciFi Bunk | Scifi Kitbash Level Builder | Polar Sci-Fi Facility | IES Light Profile Pack | FPS Game Starter Pack | Sci Fi Weapons Silver |
Design Process
Design Goal
First Person Shooter with environmental story elements.
Preproduction
Mood Board
Layout and Sketches
After establishing what type of aesthetic, mood, and tone I'm going after through research, I sketched out the shape of the ship to understand roughly how I want to have the room layouts and to contextualize my ideas into a visual format. Afterwards I develop the layout based off my sketches.
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Whiteboxing
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Blueprinting and Technical Work
Seeing that the mechanics asset pack served my purposes in combat and AI, I focused on creating several blueprints to achieve the style of FPS I wanted by creating a spawn blueprint and a lore pickup blueprint. Other technical work I did was material edits to get all the different science fiction packs to work with the European interiors asset pack to work well together.
Paradise Blueprints
Click Image to View More
Set Dressing
Conveyance
For conveyance I used yellow and blue colored assets and lighting to guide the player in the paths they can go to and interact with. The type of assets I would use to do so were decals, meshes, and lights to indicate what the player should do.
An example of this is I used yellow decals to create leading lines while for lore objects I colored them to be a bright, friendly turquoise color.
 |  Using lighting to contrast the blue keycard. |  Leading lines built from bloodstains, lighting, and broken set dressing. |
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 | Blood stains, bullet holes, and different lighting draws the player's eyes to both exits for this room. |
Kitbashing
Most everything in this level was kitbashed except for solid props such as much of the furniture and some of the large scifi assets, such as the hanger ceiling and the space ship. For everything else, I did a general kitbashing methodology where I generally used two different sci fi walls and a wooden wall base with European trimmings to create overlap between the two styles, while also taking European assets and changing the some of its materials to match the science fiction aesthetic.
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Lighting
Since I was going for a mixture of European and science fiction, I created a constant balance of cool, white lighting and warm, yellow lighting. For the science fiction rooms I filled them with the cool lights and used the warm lights for accents, while in the other rooms I used the reverse. To consistently grab the player's eye to draw them to the next room or get them to interact with a lore object, I made the doors have a yellow emissive with cool, overhanging lights, and the lore objects were light blue emissive with a mild, warm light over it.
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