Environment & Level Design - Pookie Island

Pookie Island

This is by far the largest game project that I've worked on to this day: it was a six-months long journey where I engrossed myself in different aspects of game development. I took on multiple different roles during the course of this project, but I mainly focused on level and environment design.

The Ice Island was my main responsibility. I modeled most of the environmental props in the scene using Blender and created their materials with Unity's shader graphs. The only props for the ice island that I didn't model were the tall icicles. I also designed the level of the island by blocking out the basic shapes with Unity's ProBuilder tools and brought them into Blender to further enhance them before going back to Unity texture them.

It was quite an endeavor to design the environment of an open space. Finding the perfect balance between the environment being too empty and it being too cluttered was a series of trials and errors, but using Unity's Terrain tools to randomize the distribution of the props and grass within the scene helped me fine-tune the environment to my liking.

There was a bit of tweaking of the post-processing and lighting settings for this island involved during the game development. Since the Ice Island was covered in icicles, I had to contrast the white and blue hues with custom lighting and post processing settings.