The Island


The Island is an ongoing personal exercise in environmental art and game design with Unity. This is the second iteration of this project. Which uses many of the same assets from the previous version, but has been rebuilt from the ground up with a new look, and a new map that's ten times the size of the original. The visual style is decidedly different, drawing inspiration for its camera effects from film noir. As far as gameplay is concerned though, interaction is currently limited to simply moving around the environment in first-person perspective.

Most of the assets used in this scene are from the Unity Standard Assets package. Only a handful of minor modifications were made to achieve the desired visual effect. The height map for the terrain was created in Photoshop, and refined within Unity using the built-in terrain editor. The terrain and detail splat maps were painted using Unity's terrain editor as well.

The camera controller, character controller, and image effects used in this project were also provided by the Standard Assets package. The skybox used in this scene came from the All Sky asset package, purchased through the Unity Asset Store.

Most of the assets used in this project are off-the-shelf assets. Although, I have been writing some of my own code along the way with the intention of making it reusable for future projects. So far, the only significant piece of code I've written is a TerrainQuality component. Which allows Terrain settings to be configured at runtime based on the quality setting selected by the user when launching the game. This is done through the Unity Player configuration window. I've written a handful of other scripts as well, but they're mostly minor utilities, editor scripts, and simple tools for the development pipeline.

Moving forward, my plan is to start making smaller environments as technical sketches in order to tackle specific challenges on a more manageable scale. Maybe do a series of them, starting with a new scene every couple of weeks or so depending on the rate I'm able to work on them.



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