STELLAE
A small team of coders and artists came together to create Stellae, an ambient narrative game involving a father, his daughter, and conversations about their lives together.
My team and I compiled and create 3D assets, coded interactions, drafted storylines and dialogues, and made it cohesive in Unity.
Our first step was creating a Game Design Document (GDD) to plan out the interactions and details of the game. This would end up changing several times throughout the process.
THE GAME DESIGN DOCUMENT
The GDD is a pitch entailing all of the details of our game to come. It includes artistic and visual goals, plot points and locations, and features.
GITHUB
We used Github to push, pull, and commit all changes made to the game on the Unity level. This required some balancing to make sure one team member's work would not override another, so it required a good communication and accountability. One person could not work if the materials their work depended on was not previously pushed by another member.
We then began work on our Alpha build: a version of the game that is mostly content locked, but still requiring work on code, environments, and implementation.
In this stage, we still had lots of bugs and kinks to work out, but early testers were able to move through the environment, interact with non-playable characters (NPCs), and change between major scenes. Basic dialogue systems had been implemented, but the story was still being fleshed out.
I was the main environment designer for the game. I used the Unity terrain tool to create the base ground for the game to take place on. In our GDD, we were aiming for a foresty, quiet visual aesthetic that was stylistically simple and low-poly. We wanted lighting to be intense, and the world to be full of quiet life. Taking this into account, I then sought free assets in the Unity store, such as trees, bushes, rocks, and cliffs, to flesh out the environment. We also needed other props for side challenges in the game, like building the campfire, looking for birds, and more. These I also either found or designed, and then compiled them within the game itself.
It required more than just compilation of assets. Some assets required re-painting or re-texturing. While the Unity terrain tools allowed me to place a lot of the background trees in bulk, plenty of them had to be tweaked or hand-placed to solve issues of clipping or floating. Backpacks, sticks, birds, and other things had to be placed as well. These objects also had to have colliders added to them so that the player characters could interact with them rather than pass right through them.
The environment was also designed with the intention of creating points of interest to hold the story's largest plot beats. Several unique spaces were created and utilized, such as the lakeside boat, the cliffside intro, the main site, and the stargazing field.
As the final build continued, I continued to finalize the environment. I worked to add triggers and colliders to certain quest objects and place them around the environment (like for finding sticks to build a campfire). I worked on setting particle effects for the fire and getting the water animation to look correct. I also implemented scene and time changes.
To see a final video playthrough and other parts of the game (plus my teammates' contributions), click the link below to go to the Behance page we created!
FINAL GAME
The final game is a sweet, ambient tale about a father and daughter rebuilding their connection on a camping trip. You can explore different options to make each experience different.
