Uniland
In Uniland, we aim to create a relaxing and exploratory experience established through our various inspirations from idle games to city-building games. The game features an idle style gathering system, and while exploring the world of Uniland with spiritual animals, the players builds a homeland for the spiritual animals while solving the hands-on crafting puzzles.
Explore, Gather, Restore
in the world of Uniland
After defining our goals and repeated tested our early prototypes, we pinpointed a few key aspects to focus on: environmental story telling, narrative, game economics, and color.
As shown on the map, the core area with “Explore Spots“ forms a “V“ shape by the mountains and terrains. We adpoted a 45 degree camera as well as these forward-pointing lanscape to indulge a natural flow prompting the player to keep moving forward. As the Level Design Book states, “… is how it generally feels to move along different paths / between different parts of a level”
We decided to remake our game scene from 2D into 3D with several considerations:
To achieve a highly coherent artstyle through out the game without the burden of repainting everything when we experiment with color and shading.
To provide the players with a greater sense of accomplishment from building a home and viewing what they built in 3D.
To have greater control over the level design and embraces greater potential for environmental storytelling.
We rely heavily on environmental storytelling in order to convey everything from narrative settings to information about an area.
We aim to establish immediately the overarching goal and settings of the games, restoration after natrual disaster, by building and showing “hero pieces“ such as the ruin and destructed bridges.
Similarly, we inform the players what resource might they discover by staging the environment intentionally. The split clusters of trees in a forest, the scattered apples on the groud, and the bird nests on top of each branches.
Watch a behind the scene video on our thoughts and progresses!
Since this is a W.I.P. prototype, we established a workflow to indulge maximum flexbility to adjust everything from levels to environment, 3D assets, color palette without slowing down the production.
We used shaders and materials on blank 3D Low-Poly models to manage our overall artstyle, and we create repeatedly used assets using prefabs and prefab variance to give them variations.
We tried a several different pipeline for sculpting Terrain from making a huge model in Blendor and then put it in Unity to using the Unity official Terrain Tool package. With considerations around the amount of polygons, rendering efficiency, and adjustbility, we eventually decided on a hybrid method of scultpuring a low(er)-poly rough shape in Blendor and then smoothing it inside Unity.