Debris is a cooperative, first-person, narrative-driven game centered around a team of scuba divers on a corporate-sponsored underwater expedition that quickly takes a turn for the worse. The story explores complex themes such as psychosis, mental health awareness, and moral ambiguity. Player one controls one of the scuba diver characters, while player two operates a squid drone to aid in navigation and overcoming challenges.

TASKS:

Design wise – I was responsible for structuring level spaces and overall game flow pacing. This extended to setting up enemy behavior states and encounters, positioning narrative trigger cues to tie in with gameplay beats and addressing visual signposting across the environments.  

 My efforts also involved modelling, rigging, shader development, creature design. In addition to asset production, I handled optimization tasks and led the porting multiple platforms, ensuring performance and visual fidelity across different platforms.

CORE DESIGN GOALS:

Mixing a blend of caustics, serpentine pathes, truncated ice wall tunnels, pockets of coral reefs, and twisting rock formations to create interesting level scenarios and tonally convey a player experience of being confronted with the precarious and helplessly dreadful circumstances of being trapped in underwater, uncharted abyss. There was a careful balancing act when it came with the pacing of intesity and build-up with stages of respite, exposition or downtime. Moment to moment gameplay through the levels had to comport with the voice acting, music and gameplay objectives to avoid disrupting the immersion and delivery of the story elements.

VISUAL & NAVIGATION SUPPORT:

Using caustics, emissives, strong silhouetting from schools of maritime life and forms to carve out the different level themes and divide between transitional level spaces. Different chambers would emphasize certain color hues and palettes to tonally distinguish themselves from the primary cool blues and deep blacks. Lighting and particle effects played an enormous role in parsing important gameplay moments and reveals for the player, breadcrumbing them to trail through the level’s critical/golden paths and retain ludonarrative flow.