Swarmfall (wip)
Swarmfall is a PvPvE top-down extraction shooter where players take control of mercenary personnel that scavenge post-apolayptic zones ravaged by highly mutated, gigantic insects in hopes of securing resources, technology, and equipment. They can work cooperatively together to increase their odds of survival or against each other in pursuit of greater loot and bounties for themselves. Currently in early development.
TASKS:
My game design responsibilities included brainstorming and implementing mechanics to complement existing features, adding progression systems, drafting the game economy, itemization, and resource management. When it came to combat, I handled a large chunk of it: refining gunplay combat, bullet properties and both ability behavior and appearance.
My role also extended to handling technical art, level art and set dressing for the different levels in the game. Additionally, I did some UI and UX design for the menus, partially managed the inventory along with the icons, rarities, and drop-rates of items.
Programs used:
Unreal Engine 5 – Blender – Houdini -Maya – Zbrush – Substance Painter & Designer – Photoshop – Microsoft Office – Google Docs – Perforce P4V
showcase of environments and lighting across the map level
VISUAL LANGUAGE & DESIGN IDENTITY:
The setting of Swarmfall takes place in a dying and hostile world, seemingly on its last legs suffering from calamitous events that have stained the air with toxic smog. Desaturated earthly colors and ochreous hues are preeminent in the game’s color key.
Below is one of the first level maps I’ve worked on for the game. The environmental buildings are defined by the intersection of old industrial buildings and alien overgrowth: structures of corrugated metal, cabling, and brutalist architecture violently overtaken by organic, tendril-like foreign matter. As demonstrated throughout the images below, structural assemblies are built from a consistent material palette of dark cobalt-blue weathered steel, warm ambient lighting, and yellow-green atmospheric haze.
Particular design consideration was given to how organic elements integrate with manufactured geometry, ensuring assembled structures communicate a clear sense of world’s environmental history and ongoing mutation encroachment without compromising spatial readability or directionality for the player while operating from a top-down camera. There is a radial falloff of creep infestation, tapering off from the epicenter of where the Queen/Boss of each level resides, spires of egg sacs and fleets of gigantic insects will be much more common sight in the relative area.
Asset kit breakdown of structures, creep, egg sacs, and other modular pieces
- Traditional modelling in blender for hard-surface structures with even quad-distribution to be optimized for vertex painting in engine.
- Usage of houdini + geonode setups to generate slime encapsulation around them or form pillars between objects.
- RVT blending and multi-channel vertex-paint texture blending across meshes.
- Assets sport a 512 PX/M Texel Density to strike a quality balance between the general top-down gameplay camera and the momentary close-up shots.
- Configured shader setups in Unreal Engine 5 to create the shiny, crawling, gooey look of the black slime and bubbling of the radiant egg sacs.
- Ability to change the look on a granular level, including but not limited to: the scrolling across the surface, noise movement patterns, specular, fresnel effects, and glow pulsing.
Static light baking and optimization:
Authored a hybrid lighting pipeline in Unreal Engine 5, leveraging a primarily baked static lighting foundation supplemented with dynamic spotlights, volumetric fog, and VFX-driven light sources to achieve a visually rich and performant lighting stack; fine-tuned the lightmass baking process and light map configurations to maximize quality and consistency across the environment. Mattepainted the skybox and drove it’s movement using a flowmap. Upheld rigorous optimization standards across the full environment art pipeline. This spans to asset creation, materials, LODs, and final set dressing — maintaining a ~400 draw-call average throughout and consistently meeting project performance targets able to run on mid-entry machines at 4k max settings at 120 fps.
player base and party lobby hub
An expansible home base of operations for the player character and their team members, starts off as an empty hangar, but the player can research modules and build wings to provide new services and vendor capabilities as they continue to progress in terms of power, resources, and wealth.
