Spiral Peak is my senior thesis where I lead a group of 15 artists and programmers to create a narrative-based rock climbing game. I acted as the producer and co-director as well as the environment lead, lighting artist, and character artist. As the producer and co-director, I had a hand in every aspect of the game, but my main focus artistically was building the eerie and beautiful environments that the player must adventure through to save their missing wife.
Spiral Peak consists of 3 unique levels based in the Appalachian woods of West Virginia, warped by the supernatural. As the game goes on the world gets darker and more chaotic with more obstacles impeding the player. I worked on creating the unique terrains for each level, and filling the environments to build interest and make them feel more like hiking trails.
Lighting is a major part of the environments and storytelling for Spiral Peak. The first level starts during sunset. I made sure to incorporate a lot of warm yellows and oranges. The warm lighting encourages the player to feel safe and nostalgic as they begin exploring.
The second level is after the sun sets, it is set during nighttime though most of it is in an underground mine. The lighting for this level focuses on blues and oranges. The blue is meant to represent the supernatural nature of the surroundings while the oranges leads the player through the level with the continued warmness from the beginning.
The third level is the most chaotic where the nostalgic woods gets fully overtaken by the supernatural. For this level the main colors were purple and red, with hints of bright neons throughout. While there are no more touches of the warm orange, there are a few supernatural blue lanterns scattered throughout.
Level 1
For level 1, I designed the terrain in Houdini and then sculpted in the main path in Unreal Engine. I created the tileable textures for the terrain in Substance Designer. I also worked on placing all of the models to fill the level and plotting out the wall hold placement for each wall.
Level 2
For level 2, the main focus of the level is the mine section. The mines are comprised of 13 different models for the mineshafts and caves which connect to make the twists and turns of the underground mines. I worked on sculpting and modeling all of the 13 mine models and the wooden platforms for two of the main caves. I also sculpted the terrain and placed all of the models for the level. The majority of the mine level was fully created in the span of a weekend due to time constraints, but we later went back to touch up any issues.
Level 3
For level 3, I worked on sculpting the main terrain and the floating ground, rock walls, and the floating platform models, as well as doing the textures for the floating earth sections. A lot of my main task for this level was art direction and working out how to create an interesting and unique level that follows the narrative quickly and efficiently as we were cutting it very close to the deadline and did not have the resources to expend to create a whole new level with a ton of new models and textures. We settled on a chaotic spiraling level that reuses a lot of existing models from previous levels, but in a way that shows that the world has become dreamlike and overtaken by the supernatural forces of the woods. Also to save individual textures we created a shader that reflects the night sky skybox for the level which adds to the dreamlike look.
I worked on the character models for Elmsy the player character and Tooth the ghost companion. I sculpted the models in Blender then retopologized and UVed in Maya, the textures were hand painted in Substance Painter.
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