ZOLARIS
SOFTWARE:
Unreal Engine 4 | Blueprints | Maya
INSPIRATION:
1st person stealth | RPG | Fallout | Bioshock | Dishonored
JOB TITLE:
Creative Director/ Lead Level designer
TEAM SIZE: 13
DURATION: 8 Months
Zolaris is a first-person stealth game about Valeria, a spirit medium bounty hunter, trying to escape a cathedral crawling with murderous cultists. The player must use their abilities to defeat the cultists in order to escape their capture. In Zolaris there are 7 different maps around the Cathedral, 3 of which the player must overcome. These locations include - The Library, The Worship Hall, The Garden, The Crypt, The Main Hall, The Chapter House, and The Mess Hall.
LEVELS
When I sat down to design some of the map layouts, I wanted to design different areas to allow the player to choose how they wanted to play the game between stealth and combat. For this reason, the Owl and Bear paths were created for each encounter zone. The Owl paths prioritized Stealth, as where the Bear paths prioritized combat.
GAMEPLAY
THE GARDEN
The Garden is the centre of the church and serves as the main hub for the player. When designing this I wanted the player to have options on how to proceed to their different challenges while also under constant threat of the enemy. My main role for the garden was lighting to present the scene in an eerie nighttime atmosphere. This was to ensure the player was always on their toes, to provide locations they can hide and stay out of site from other cultists, and keep the theme of our cultist horror aesthetic.
CRITICAL PATH AND MAPS
The Map layout for the garden was designed in a hub-like style so that the player could run through this space multiple times in one play-through. Along the edges of the garden, there are stone pillars and ledges that can be used to obstruct the view of enemy cultists. There are also flowing waterways that intentionally connect from the garden to the Worship hall . This allows players my options on how they want to stealth around both levels
LIGHTING EFFECTS
When Lighting this space I wanted to focus on the eerie atmosphere to most effectively encapsulate the player's interest, however, I ran into a few difficulties when trying to portray low light. Mainly the shadows in some spaces were entirely to powerful. To resolve this issue I added an exponential fog to cover the world and increased our skylight sensitivity to soffen the show darkness. Once that was done, in the post process I lightened the color of the shadows so they fit the aesthetic and atmosphere
WHITE BOX LIGHTING
