For my Innovations Assignment at University, I chose to work on a game project. This would be my first time using Unreal Engine, or any game engine, so I had to learn the software and its capabilities from scratch.

The scene is done from a top-down POV, which is intentional as I wanted to see if I could apply techniques from older dungeon-crawling/adventure games which used this camera angle, such as ‘Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past’.

I wanted to achieve high fidelity assets but keep it playable. To push the use of the top-down format, I wanted to play with the framing, colour and light, use of depth, and layout.

I’m overall pleased with the project! There are a few problem with it, however – the layout can be confusing (though in this case there was no end-point anyway), the lighting was too dim in places, and the scene wasn’t very well optimised. These are things I’ll learn from in future.

Here’s a video of my narrated walk-through of the environment: