Echos der Vergangenheit: Versunkene Erinnerungen - Bachelor's Thesis Project

Within three (out of the four) months I created the practical part of my bachelor thesis titled "Prototypical realization of a narrative adventure game based on methods of environmental storytelling".

The setting of the game is Upper Lusatia in Eastern Germany in the year 2043. Due to the climate crisis, a reservoir has dried up, exposing a formerly flooded village. The player now sets out to explore this village and the deeper he goes into the middle of the lake, the older the artifacts he finds become.

Since I want to work as an environment artist, I took the corresponding tasks as the focus of the work and concentrated mostly on the creation or design of the game world.

After writing a games design concept, I made a worldbuilding spreadsheet in which I defined the environmental and demographic data, cultural identities, and cultural systems of the place for the years 2043, 2019, 1965, 1945, 1850, 1540, and 1390. Following this, I defined the style and visual language and designed a minimalist UI for the game. I then made the layout of the game environment and level sections and used it to create a first blockout in Unreal Engine 5.1, followed by the implementation of the menus and game mechanics (inspection mode, photo mode, photo gallery).

This was followed by the creation of props relevant to the story/setting, all of which I modeled and UV unwrapped myself in Blender using a midpoly workflow, and then divided them up with vertex colors before texturing them in Substance Painter (base color-, normal-, height-, ORM map). Stickers, posters and custom normal maps from images I made in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. For the ruins, I created a simple modular system of walls and break-off edges and applied a world-aligned material to them in UE. I then assembled the game world, utilizing the Quixel Megascans library for vegetation and additional assets. Finally, I set up the lighting and implemented a simple weather system that uses triggers to change the atmosphere depending on the section.

The music was contributed by Stefan Dedek, who composed and produced it based on my concepts in close consultation with me. It, along with the sound effects, was also implemented by me in UE.

If you want to play the prototype yourself, it is available on https://ozzelordstudio.itch.io/echos-of-the-past.