Cosmic Vision

Cosmic Vision was a two-week project I did during my first year of Game Design. The course this project was made for was about the future, space, and the next direction(s) for humankind. We were invited to think and theorize liberally about all kinds of matters to do with the future of humankind, including space travel, new forms of governments, extraterrestrial life, etc.  

I set out to create a narrative experience in the then newly released beta version of Unreal Engine 5. The first steps of the process included drafting the world and environment the experience would be set in.  I wanted to highlight the ethical question of sending humans to other planets as pioneers for new civilisations. The first week was largely spent on storyboarding and concepting the vision for the experience.  Themes I included in the experience were human identity, cyborgs, spiritualism and the human mind.

The second week was dedicated to building the playable experience. The first steps included building the player movement and interactions with the world, and the big events from the storyboard that would be featured in the game. Using MegaScans and MetaHuman I was able to very quickly build and populate large areas of our playable map. Most of the buildings/structures in the game were still handmade, however. 

Using Unreal Engine 5's Lumen and Nanite, the game was testable and playable without much need for optimization and time-concerns, which allowed us to finish a quite ambitious project in such a short amount of time.