OVERVIEW
Landed is a narrative driven single player game and you play as Nate a robot who lives in the city of Australium on a floating island he discovers is actually falling rapidly into the abyss. While initially distraught by this discovery, Nate learns a way to save himself and others from this certain fate. The player must convince the other members of the island of this truth, and save everybody from this demise over the course of 7 days before the island collapses.
Landed is centered around interacting with the residents of the island choosing dialogue options. Your decisions directly impact the outcome of events, how others interact with you, and ultimately who is, and is not, saved from the island's ultimate fate.​
ABOUT
A fellow game designer at UCI, and friend came to me in spring quarter my freshman year with an idea for a game she had been thinking about for a long time wanting to know what I thought of it. I was the first person she had told about it and I thought the idea was interesting and was willing to work with her on it. We agreed we should pitch it to the Video Game Design Club (VGDC) at UCI. VGDC is a club of around 250 members which allows students to once every quarter pitch game ideas to a student body interested in working on games to get a large enough team to make it happen. At this point the game was just a concept with a lot that needed to be worked out before pitching. I thought the game could be good, and helped her get ready for the pitch. We pitched the game during Fall Quarter 2024. The game has been in development since it was pitched.
After pitching our project grew to a team size of around 17 people. The team has shifted in size throughout development with members leaving and new ones coming onboard but has continued throughout with 5 core members who have been working on it from the start.
YEAR
2024-2025
PLATFORM
Unity
MAIN ROLE
3d Modeler/ Art Lead, Level Design
SECONDARY ROLES
Design, Writing
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Watch Landed's First Trailer!
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WHAT I HAVE DONE
My main role during development of Landed has been 3D modeling environment art and characters. I lead all of the artists on the the team ensuring all art it cohesive and matches the games style. I assign the other 3D artists tasks giving them reference material and information to go off of. Once they are finished they send me their plain model and I handle applying materials to it, fixing any issues with the models toplogy and such and export it to Unity where I then do level design with the finished models. I designed and created the entire games world. A vast majority of the games 3D art was created by me.
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HOW I SOLVED A MAJOR ISSUE
Making and having models appear properly in my 3D modeling software (Blender) was not an issue however the pipeline to in engine (Unity) was an absolute nightmare with the games initial art style. Due to my previous lack of experience exporting high quality models with complex and materials to Unity I had difficulty having them appear properly in the engine. The complexity and detail of my models was simply too costly on performance as initially I was not aware of how greatly the way I was making things was impacting it. I was not truly aware of how much attention I had to pay to optimization as it only became a problem when they were transferred in the engine.
I adapted by revamping models, trying alternate texturing methods, export settings, and remaking the work I had previously done for performance sake; however there were still a large number of issues. It was clear to me that the artstyle was not sustainable for the whole game and that a large change was needed. This solution to this was the complete revamp of the art style.
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WHAT I AM MOST PROUD OF TO DATE
I pitched and initiated a massive overhaul to the game's art style, narrative and direction. I realized that the current art style and direction which the game was going with was not unique enough to make the game stand out and that a large overhaul was needed to give the game a unique look and fix development problems. The higher fidelity models I was creating before were aiming for a realistic detailed style which took too long to make at a large scale with a wide variety of issues associated with them.
The complete change in art style required not only a full reexamination of what stylistically would fit the game but also large narrative revamps that make sense of the new look gameworld.
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Though I am glad I pitched the idea and that it was accepted by the team, the change was not easy as my dozens of hours of previous work had to be thrown out and the game's look had to be rebuilt from the ground up. It was the right decision in the end and the game is far better because of it.
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LANDED
SHOWCASE - OLD ART STYLE
These buildings are from our old style before we I proposed our transition to a new style. These models use high quality photoscanned textures from Poly Haven. While detailed the models I made in the old style were too costly on performance due to high face counts and high amounts of subdivisions. All the screenshots below are entirely my work.
SHOWCASE - NEW ART STYLE
Below is the new art style which the game follows. It is far more stylized and unique compared to what we were going for previously which was far more grounded. This new style has really given the game its own identity.
