ODYSSEY GAME PROJECT

Odyssey is a 2D side-scroller game developed as part of a university project. This was my second Interactive Project where we were free to design our own brief and go our own direction. I knew straight away that I wanted to continue developing my skills in Unreal Engine, fixing all the mistakes I made during my first game project (A Fox Tale) and take what I had previously learned and expand it. Considering the fact that was project was during my final year at university, the scale naturally had to be much larger.

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Before designing the game, I had a rough idea of the overall theme I wanted to explore, which was a Sci-fi Planetary game involving a rover main character. This was because it gave me this huge opportunity to design a completely new type of environment. I began the project with designing the setting of the game, creating mood boards of different alien planet art and using them to design 6 different environmental concepts as shown below. I was never satisfied completely with the outcomes as they seemed to generic and needed to be more vibrant and must feature platforms for the robot to jump on. So after some experimentation, I created an interesting design inspired by Avatar's Pandora world that features floating rocks and a unique blue tint.

The next stage was to design the character. I knew straight away that I wanted to give him a personality, much like Wall.E or a Star Wars droid. This was perhaps the toughest part of the project. In the end I nailed my design to 4 different final concepts which were chosen by myself and the class.

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A few new features that was outlined on my brief that I knew I needed was a start animation, menu screen and a Collectible system. In order to create these things, I needed a story. Why is this rover here? Does he have a mission? Then the idea grew that the player would start off in a landed rocket and proceeds to explore the terrain looking for valuable alien artifacts. He was one of many designed to overcome the dangers that lay beyond.