Rings of Lies

Rings of Lies was a project created in a ten-week time frame, with the concept being for a 1st person horror game. This environment really challenged my skills to make a full scene with gameplay in only ten weeks, where I focused on my time management skills, understanding the scope of my abilities, sticking to concept, and optimizing game assets for a visually engaging environment.

Softwares:

Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Substance Painter, Maya, SpeedTree, Unreal Engine

Story Concept and Moodboarding

The first step I did was make a short storyline for the environment.

You wake up in a strange forest, unsure of how you got here. Looking around, all is dark except for a clearing in front of you. Through a moon gate you can see into the clearing, a soft hill in the middle where the light shines brightest. On the top of the hill stands a figure, a white silhouette humming softly, that you can't help be drawn towards. Maybe they can help you get out of here...

You walk further, hoping that the figure can tell you how to get out of here. Walking through the moon gate however, something changes. The figure is suddenly gone. Surely they weren't an illusion, you swore you heard them humming. You walk closer to take a look.

As you walk you notice a ring of mushrooms growing around the bottom of the hill, you hesitate but walk further, hearing someone giggle as you cross. Maybe your ears are playing tricks on you, you think. You finally make your way to the top of the hill where you saw the figure, and look down at the ground, a music box is where they stood. Do you pick it up?

Images from https://pin.it/1KNvwMQO6

I loved the idea of creating a moongate, and was drawn towards the allure that mythical forest have, but I wanted to incorporate a darker side to the theme. After making that initial moodboard and storyline, I narrowed down an art style I wanted to try and use, the lighting/mood for the scene, as well as key motifs that would be seen throughout the environement. The story was about a young protagonist being lured into the woods, so I thought about what might be placed in the environment to draw a child further into the woods. Here is where I got the idea to place toys around the moongate, as to bring the child closer until they were inevitably trapped.

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Creating the Layout

After setting up a storyline and moodboards, I started mapping how I wanted a player to traverse the environment and follow the story.

I created a quick and simple blockout in Unreal engine of how I wanted the scene to look. As well as an asset sheet of what I wanted to start making for the environment.

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Adding Assets

The first set of assets I worked on were for the overall environment, making the moongate, trees, mushrooms for the fairy ring, and some stepping stones. After I placed them into Unreal to make sure the layout worked well, I also did a first pass on the lighting.

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I then worked on more assets, and added textures to everything, as well as worked on my second lighting pass.

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At this point in my work, I also started to work on the technical components of the environment. I wanted it to be that when the player walks through the moongate, the mood changes and the lighting gets darker.

Finalizing the Scene

After running some playtests, I made some adjustments to how the technical aspects would play out. For example, I stopped the player movement in the moongate so that the player would see the visual effects instead of walking straight through and missing cues. I also added larger particles to the music box at the end of the environment so that players would see it better and know to walk towards it.

I took some more feedback and extended the opening of the level, as well as added more foliage pieces around the environment to try and fill the area out more.

Final Products

Visual Reel

Gameplay Reel